The Templars and the Shroud of Christ

by Barbara Frale

  The Templars never exhibited the Shroud to the faithful, never got alms from it, never used it to profit from indulgences, indeed they kept it hidden from most of their own members.

  Why, then, did they wish to hold and keep this strange object?

  A new Sepulchre

  As I explained earlier, there is reason to believe, from the complex information at our disposal, that the Templars may have endowed their little linen string with a new, spiritual meaning, when the Order came into contact with the Shroud and discovered its singular properties, especially the awe-striking “belt of blood”. The little belts worn by every member of the Order, which had been in the past consecrated thanks to contact with the stone of the Holy Sepulchre, were now consecrated through contact with the Shroud after Jerusalem was lost. The Shroud came to be, in a sense, a “new Sepulchre”, but as compared with the grave inside the magnificent basilica of Anastasis, it had a much greater power over the imagination; and this power seemed to the Templars to be of vital importance in a truly difficult historical moment.

  Between 1198 and 1202, as the French barons were working on the organisation of the new Crusade, Innocent III set up a series of reforming policies to raise the fortunes of Temple and Hospital: after the catastrophic defeat at Hattin by Saladin, the two military orders were on their knees, both because of the loss of fighting men and goods, and because of the immense blow to their image in the eyes of the West, who saw them as the bulwark of Christianity in the Holy Land. The Pope intended to make it easier to join the two orders, and so encourage many lay knights and replenish the ranks of the Templars and Hospitallers. His first step was to broaden certain privileges actually already granted by Innocent II in 1139, especially to allow Templar cemeteries to bury such faithful as wished to be laid to rest there; then came the permission to admit excommunicates into the Temple, a very bold decision that wholly reversed the clearly stated purpose of St. Bernard of Clairvaux at the beginning. Bernard had long fought to stem the spread of Cathar heresy in the Midi, and his preaching had resulted in many conversions, which however had not lasted long. When drafting the Templar rule, the Abbot of Clairvaux was stern: admission to the Temple was totally forbidden to excommunicates, and Templars had no right to accept even alms from such persons as had been placed outside the Catholic communion.[86]

  In 1206 this rule was abrogated, and the Temple was opened to these knights, who made up a kind of reserve of energies which could not be exploited because they had been placed outside Christian society. Innocent III had decided that the emergency of the times was enough to justify such an alteration of St. Bernard’s precepts, and that in the end one could follow the same rationale seen in his time by Pope Urbanus II when he had called for the first Crusade in 1095: in many countries in Europe, these excommunicated knights lived at the margins of society, eking out a living by enlisting as mercenaries with some mighty lord who employed them to raid his enemies; or indeed they would turn into true bandits, bloodily assaulting peasants and churches. Offering them absolution if they took vows as Templar or Hospitaller brothers meant giving them a second chance: they could save their souls by serving God and the defence of Jerusalem, and what is more they could be turned into a strong resource for the Christian army.

  This is a typical instance of a reform carried out with

  the best intentions and yet ending up doing serious damage. Innocent III was fully within his rights in

  rewriting Templar statutes; a principle contained

  precisely in their statutes declared that the Pope was the master of the order and their lord after Jesus Christ.[87] Pontiffs did not in actual fact ever meddle in Order affairs, and the interference mentioned a few pages ago to have Amaury de La Roche made Preceptor of France is probably the only notable case of this kind; at any rate, and to judge by the tone of the Papal missive, it seems that it had been the Templars themselves who had suggested this reform. The move was completed when another pontifical letter was issued, sanctioning that the privileges bestowed on knights intending to become Templars were extended automatically to their whole family. In 1213, Innocent III was to complain about excessively broad interpretations of the Papal will, but it is a fact that the way his letter had been drafted all but encouraged that kind of reading. [88]

  Within certain limits, the Temple had become a kind of free port, a privileged pathway to redemption, as well as good for sheltering from persecution. When you consider how widespread the Cathar heresy was in southern France, and the climate that was created early in the Albigensian Crusade, it is obvious that many families with Cathar connections could not take the opportunity offered by this amnesty fast enough; to be legally protected against the Inquisition, but also against the hard men from the north who were taking advantage of theological conflicts to strike at their political and economic interests. Many passages in ancient sources show that the atmosphere had become nightmarish, and had brought about absurd situations. For instance, it had become quite dangerous to call on the Holy Spirit, for it was known that Cathars recognised only one sacrament, the transmission of the Holy Spirit by laying-on of hands. In the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly underlines the power and sacredness of the Spirit for Christians, but still they preferred not to so much as mention him at all, as if he did not exist; even in the most intimate moments there was someone who listened, made guesses, and then laid information before the authorities. A knight’s wife from Cestayrols near Albi was declared a suspect because, in the agony of childbirth, she had cried out: “Holy Spirit of God, help me!” In 1254, a man from Montgey in Tarn, gravely ill, called on the Holy Spirit to be healed, but his brother made him shut up lest he attracted the interest of inquisitors.[89]

  We cannot currently make firm estimates, but it seems more than likely that some sons from aristocratic families with Cathar connections were made Templars and so extended the mantle of papal protection; and it may be that not every one of these men changed their religious ideas, when you consider that they had entered the Temple to stay alive. Unorthodox talk or behaviour from this or that Templar leader may have roused some scandal among the laity and in any case did the Order’s public image, already damaged by widespread envy at their many privileges, no good.

  The file of Philip the Fair’s charges against the arrested Templars of France includes an accusation that the priests of the Order would not consecrate the Host during Mass; a charge that makes no sense if taken in a general manner, for many ordinary folks went to Mass in Templar churches and such an oddity in the liturgy would never have gone unnoticed. It is however possible that Nogaret’s hired spies had picked up sporadic matter from Heaven knows where, isolated and very rare rumours which however must have looked from the prosecution’s viewpoint like manna from heaven.

  Cathars, in fact, did not celebrate the Eucharist, because according to their doctrine the body of Christ had nothing important about it; it was simply a kind of empty shell; nor had there ever been a real sacrifice of Christ that it should be right to renew or to commemorate by celebrating a sacrament. The Christ, the heavenly messenger of God, could not in their view die at all, for his nature was not compounded of the vile, useless mortal detritus that forms men; death may have welcomed the man Jesus, the physical carrier in which the Christ had dwelled for a while, and whom to the Cathars had no importance at all. In effect, during the trial some testimonies were collected which pointed in that direction: during a ceremony of admission, a preceptor said to the new-made Templar that God had never died.

  It is probably this kind of broken-off reports of hearsay that led an Oriental scholar such as Hammer-Purgstall to write things like Baphometus Revelatus: reading the few sources then available on the trial, he may have guessed at the connection between the charges made against the Templars and those against the Cathars. Then the cultural fashions of his time, the deforming pressure of Metternich’s interests, and for that matter a highly questionable method of research, led him
to exercise his fantasy till he imagined a whole Templar order turning its back en masse on Catholicism and secretly reviving dark and extremely ancient rites.

  Today, an overall examination of all the sources on the trial allows us to know that this was at best a tiny phenomenon, limited in time and restricted to the French Midi, where repression against heresy was most intense and above all most bitterly political. The Templars of Italy, of Spain, of Germany, of Scotland and England, of the Slav countries, of Syria-Palestine and Armenia, so far as we can tell, were wholly untouched. It was only south France that saw a momentary and extremely limited spread of heterodox ideas on the Christ, tied to a precise historical moment and to Innocent III’s amnesty: a negligible phenomenon, a tiny spark which however Nogaret was in time to use to start a forest fire.

  Thomas and the wound

  Curiously, the area where the heretical contamination was broadest was also the one where the cult of Christ’s Shroud was most strongly rooted in the Temple. If the Templars had the opportunity to keep the precious object, it is clear that they wished to keep it for the same reasons that had led Constantine VII to make it the most venerated relic in Constantinople: it was a deadly weapon against the spread of heresies, a far stronger antidote than the preachers’ sermons or even the fires of the Inquisition. No learned debates could have controlled mediaeval men, often illiterate but endowed with an intuition we cannot fully understand today. The Cathars said that the Christ had no true human body or blood; once properly unfolded, the sheet of the Shroud shows the tormented body of the Passion just as the Gospels describe it. Above all, one could see the blood, a lot of blood, scattered everywhere. By the tear among the ribs, indeed, the flow was of stunning size, and the mind could not but go back to the words of the Gospels. In the Last Supper, Jesus had said: “This is my blood for the new and everlasting Covenant, poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins”.[90]

  That outpoured blood was still there for everyone to see, soaked through the linen of the Shroud. It could be seen, touched, kissed. It was the best remedy against all heresies. Two centuries later, Martin Luther would write: “The Cross alone is our theology.” It is a sentence distant in time, but it embodies excellently what the Shroud meant for the Templars. One testimony given in the Poitiers trial before the Pope seems to show exactly this dynamic: brother Pons de Brozet, Preceptor of Provence, welcomed a young recruit into the Temple in 1288, and after the obligatory liturgy of the admission ceremony, shows him, first the face above the altar, then a cross. Then he tells him that he should not believe in the Cross, but in that Face, because God never died, and makes him adore and kiss the Face “as relics are kissed”. Pons de Brozet is one of the dignitaries who had the personal keeping of the Shroud; if we visualise the scene with the Shroud folded in the container-reliquary that only showed the face, then everything starts to make sense: the miraculous image that shows how Jesus was not in the Sepulchre for more than three days, the image that bears the sign of Jonas, that shows the Resurrection. Heretics preached that the man Jesus had died, that that was the natural end of man, and that flesh could not rise again. But a Templar does not have to listen to such false alternative doctrines, must never believe that everything ended with the crucifixion. The crucifixion was only the beginning: the idol, the mysterious image that bears the marks of Resurrection, is its evidence.[91]

  Another important fact must be noted. The bloodstains left on the Shroud correspond to dense flows, some of which – especially those to the face, the nail wounds, and the hit to the ribs – come from broken veins and are the remains of a very abundant flow. Today, however, nothing is left of the large, solid coagulations that the linen once bore, as if the stuff had lost, after unknown events, most of that thickened, solidified blood that originally stood in solid masses in relief on the sheet, like the crusts of so many wounds. In Constantinople, dispersed in the capital’s over one thousand churches, there were many reliquaries claiming to contain a part of the Holy Blood of Jesus, and many of them were taken to Europe by crusaders after the sack of 1204. This vast movement of the relics of the Blood excited intensely the imaginative faculties of mediaeval man, because it was intimately connected with the mystery of the Eucharist; and it could have influenced the transformation of the legends of the Holy Grail, which in the most ancient versions is nothing more than a miraculous dish described in some Celtic sagas. However, just in the years that follow the Fourth Crusade, it begins to be celebrated as the Cup of the Last Supper, or else as the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea was supposed to have collected the blood coming from the side of the crucified Jesus.[92] In any case, these reliquaries of the Blood were small ampoules made of crystal or rock crystal that contained minute amounts of dried blood. Considering their Byzantine origin, everything suggests that that dried blood had been scraped from the crusts once present on the Shroud; in that sense, those relics were true, that is, they contained the blood from an object believed to be the true Shroud of Christ, certified by the authority of the Emperor of Constantinople. If that was the case, we are not surprised to hear of people spending astronomical sums to have them.[93]

  If the order of the Temple suffered a certain contamination from heretics, it is not strange that it should think of gaining a powerful medicine of faith to fight its war in a quiet, private, invisible way. The Order’s high dignitaries carried out delicate diplomatic missions for the Emperors of Byzantium, they knew well the imperial palace of Constantinople, with its hall of wonders. Concerned at the spread of Cathar thought, that had shot through a large part of Christian society and of the Catholic Church, the Order of the Temple thought that the disbelief of some of its own members could be cured in the simple, effective way that had once conquered St. Thomas. The Apostle had declared that he would not believe Jesus had risen from the dead unless he had first seen and touched the open wound in his side; so too Templars fallen into doubt would have been saved by the ability to see with their own eyes the signs of Christ’s humanity imprinted in that amazing relic. To see and also to touch, as we said: according to the sources, the Templars used to worship the Shroud with a liturgy that included kissing the wounds on the feet.[94]

  In the light of these thoughts it no longer seems so strange that the investigators who led the Languedoc enquiry came down so hard on issues of heresy and sorcery, in such an excessive way as to have no comparison elsewhere: maybe in those territories there had been whispers of scandal, hearsay or even only unorthodox behaviours, which had roused the shadow of suspicion. Even if it had been only one case or two, one or two cases would have been enough in that territory.

  It is curious that many modern believers tend to look on the Shroud of Turin as evidence that Jesus actually did rise; the Templars, on the other hand, if they kept it at all as the evidence suggests, sought in it an utterly different truth. That Jesus had risen they had never doubted; what they needed was the evidence that the Christ had indeed died. The Templar leaders’ choice to keep the existence and cult of the Shroud secret proved in time a tragic mistake. Although it is unfair to write history from the point of view of 20-20 hindsight and to start imagining what might have happened if-if-if, some facts are absolutely evident: the Shroud’s identity, and its charisma, were more than enough to protect the Order of the Temple from any attempt to charge them for crimes against religion. Had the world known with certainty what the mysterious Templar idol really was, had they seen it and seen the veneration with which it was treated, the black legend of Baphomet would never have been born and all of Philip the Fair’s other charges would have shrunk to the level of backstairs courtier chit-chat.

  At present the sources we have do not allow us to understand when exactly the Shroud came into the Temple’s possession, and when it left it to pass to other guardians: the one thing we do know is that it stayed

  within the order for some time and that it left indelible traces in its spirituality. Some authors, such as Dubarle, Zaccone, Raffa
rd de Brienne and Alessandro Piana, believe that after the sack of Constantinople the sheet passed directly into the hands of the house of La Roche, and I also share this idea so far as the available sources are concerned; historian Willy Müller on the other hand believes that the Shroud was kept in Germany for some time and had something to do with the Emperor Frederick II, and on his side it must be said that the Shroud’s face has left very clear traces in the German Templar tradition, which placed it on the verso of the seal of the Preceptors of Germany. All these reconstructions cannot really be said to contradict each other; they are only the distinct stages in a long journey of which, in the end, we still know very little.[95]

  In fact, the history of the Shroud remains open to hypotheses until the mid-fourteenth century, when it becomes the object of so many written accounts as to leave no space for doubt; for the previous centuries, Ian Wilson’s reconstruction is indubitably the one that shows the highest degree of likelihood and probability. At any rate, whether or not it was the same as the celebrated mandylion, the presence of the Shroud in the imperial collection in Constantinople is certified by various sources. In 1200/1201 the city was in chaos due to the coup that had overthrown the Emperor Isaac II Angelos;

  a riot shook the imperial palace, and the custodian of relics, the historian Nicholas Mesarites, had to face down the rioters to prevent their profaning the chapel of Pharos. He managed to calm the soldiers down by appealing to the extreme sacredness of the place: the objects collected within made up a new Jerusalem, something that kept the earth in touch with the heavens, and had to stay outside any political issue. Nicholas describes the Shroud unmistakably, as a funeral sheet where the image of Jesus was outlined as a shape without border lines. “It is made of linen, a humble and simple material, and still has the smell of myrrh. It cannot perish, because it covered the dead body, with ill defined borders, naked, covered with myrrh after the Passion”.[96]