The Real History Behind the Templars

by Sharan Newman

The word “graal” was in common use in France then. It meant a vessel or a goblet.9 However, in the grail stories, it soon came to mean a chalice. It was in the thirteenth-century work by Robert de Baron that the word “holy” began to be used with it, as the Grail became identified with the story of Joseph of Arimathea, who provided the tomb for Jesus.10In Christian apocrypha Joseph was also supposed to have used a dish to catch the blood of Jesus as he was dying on the cross.11A much later legend had Joseph, like Mary Magdalene and James, the patriarch of Jerusalem, finding refuge in Europe, in this case, England.

  As legends tend to run together, it was a short step from this to making the Grail the cup that caught the blood and Joseph a part of the Arthurian body of tales.

  A thirteenth-century version of the Perceval story gives Joseph of Arimathea a nephew, also named Joseph, who is a “good knight, chaste and a virgin in his body, strong and generous of heart.”12 This is the man who becomes the Fisher King and guards “the lance with which Jesus was wounded and the cup with which those who believed in Him . . . collected the blood that flowed from his wounds while he was being crucified.”13 But many other authors gave other names to the king and other explanations for the Grail. Since the story had no basis in fact, writers were free to imagine anything they liked.

  In the later medieval French romances the Grail was clearly seen as a Christian relic, something associated with the act of transubstantiation in the Mass. In several of them, the vision of the Grail includes that of a child or of Jesus on the cross.14

  It is only in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s German version that the Templars are connected with the Grail. Wolfram makes the Grail a stone, fallen from the sky. It has magical powers that give health and eternal youth. The power of the stone, however, comes from a “small white wafer” brought by a dove every year on Good Friday. “And from that the stone derives whatever good fragrances of drink and food there are on earth, like to the perfection of Paradise. . . . Thus, to the knightly brotherhood, does the power of the Grail give sustenance!”15 The knightly brotherhood is, of course, the Tempeleisen, the guardians of the Grail. This was based loosely on the Templars. However, unlike the Templars, there are women in the Tempeleisen.16

  Even though there might be a folkloric base for some of the plot, there is no doubt in any of the Grail stories that the author is a Christian. I see no problem with Wolfram making the Templars guardians of the Grail. When he was writing in the early thirteenth century, the Templars were still seen as those who protected the way for pilgrims to Jerusalem. They might well have been added to the story to make it more immediate, as thriller writers put known organizations in their books to place them firmly in the current time. However, Wolfram and those who drew their stories from his were the only ones who used the Templars in the Grail story. It was not part of the core tradition.

  In an interesting study, an art historian has pointed out images of the Virgin Mary in several twelfth-century churches in the north of Spain in which she is holding a dish from which rays of light radiate. He thinks that this might represent the gifts of the Holy Spirit and could be a basis for the Grail story.17 This is intriguing and needs to be followed up by scholars in other areas of Medieval Studies. The main problem is in connecting the authors of the first Grail stories to northern Spain. There is no evidence to support this. A link in other art or literature would be very exciting.

  Unfortunately, information like this is too often taken up by people without historical training. They look at the image and fit it into their own pet theories without doing the background research, as we saw with the term San Greal earlier.

  Although there is a certain common thread, all the medieval stories about the Grail have a different emphasis. That’s because they are fiction and not intended to be historical accounts. Like the rest of the Arthurian stories, those about the Grail reflect the outlook of the authors and the times in which they lived. At the end of the fifteenth century, when Thomas Malory made his English version of the legend of Arthur, the Grail stories were about the adventures and duties of a Christian knight. Most listeners understood that the magical quests were fantasy and they enjoyed them as many people do science fiction today.

  However, the stories about King Arthur and the Grail lost popularity soon after Malory wrote. The message of the Grail was too full of imagery from the Mass to be acceptable to the newly formed Protestant denominations. Along with this, taste in literature changed. “The coming of the Reformation was the moment at which the Grail vanished from poetic imagination.”18

  But two centuries later, it appeared again, in an entirely new form. In the eighteenth century the fashion arose for secret societies. Perhaps it was in reaction to the egalitarian beliefs that would produce the American and French revolutions. Perhaps all that rational thought and enlightenment was unfulfilling. I don’t really know. But groups such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasons borrowed freely from arcane texts and mystical treatises of the medieval and ancient world, taking symbols from them and creating new meanings. The Grail was one of these symbols.

  The connection between the Templars and the Grail seems to have been reestablished through the efforts of an Austrian named Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. In 1818 he wrote a book that condemned the Masons as a group of heretics directly connected to the Templars and Gnostics. “The conclusion of his work is that a pagan religion survived alongside Catholicism into the Middle Ages, and in the guise of Freemasonry, remained a threat to the Church even in the early nineteenth century.”19

  At the same time that the mystical aspects of the Grail were mutating, nineteenth-century-romantic writers and artists were creating their own versions of the stories. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King was arguably the most popular of these in English. In Germany, Wagner’s operas Parsival and Lohengrin combined the renewed interest in national origins with his own image of Christianity.

  It was the twentieth century that took the Grail to unexplored territory. For the most part, it was still entwined with the story of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Perceval, and Galahad. But these familiar characters appeared in totally different forms. The Grail could be a pagan vessel, as in Marian Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon or a made-up excuse to get out of the house, as in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail it was a pointless quest. None of these modern stories mention the Templars in connection to the Grail.

  A whole generation has the Grail and the Templars forever combined thanks to Steven Spielberg and Indiana Jones. However, the knight in the film is never called a Templar. He is only the most worthy of three brothers who found the Grail. In this version, the cup never came to Europe but stayed in a hidden place that looks remarkably like the ancient city of Petra.

  Today the Grail is still as much a mysterious symbol to us as it was to medieval listeners. As was true then, the Grail is something different for each person. No two people have ever completely agreed on what the Grail looks like, never mind what it represents. But in current usage today the Holy Grail is everywhere. Awards are “the Holy Grail of Beach Volleyball” for instance. The Holy Grail of a collector is that one rare piece that has been rumored to exist but never seen. It’s the goal just out of reach.

  Dan Brown put it very well at the end of The Da Vinci Code: “the Holy Grail is simply a grand idea . . . a glorious unattainable treasure that somehow, even in today’s world of chaos, inspires us.”20

  At the end of his excellent study of the Grail legend, Richard Barber gives a listing of the number of times the term “the Holy Grail” has been used in major Western newspapers from 1978 to 2002. In 1978 there were sixteen uses (fifteen in the Washington Post). In 2002 alone, there were 1,082.21

  The fact that recent fiction has attached the Grail to the Templars says more about how we see the Templars now than what they were in reality. Perhaps it says that we prefer our Templars to be fictional.

  1Larousse, Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Francais (P
aris, 1992) p. 296. Also, Fredéric Godefroye, Lexique de l’Ancien Français (Paris, 1990) p. 261. Both dictionaries give the first meaning as “cup” or “vase.”

  2Thomas Malory, Works ed. Eugéne Vinaver (London, 1971) p. 519.

  3Matthias Lexer, Mittel-hochdeutsches Taschen-wörterbuch p. 75.

  4Gorka Aulesti and Linda White, Basque-English, English-Basque Dictionary (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992) p. 516.

  5Mabinogian, ed. and tr. Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones (Everyman’s Library, 1949) p. 82.

  6Ibid.

  7Richard Barber, The Holy Grail, Imagination and Belief (London: Putnam, 2004) pp. 240-43.

  8“Perceval le Gallois ou le Conte du Graal,” tr. Lucien Foulet, in Danielle Régnier-Bohler, ed., La Légende Arthurienne, le Graal et la Table Ronde (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989) p. 47.

  9Frédèric Godefroy, Lexique de l’Ancien Français (Paris: Champion, 1990) p. 261.

  10Matthew 27:57-60.

  11Gospel of Nicodemus.

  12Christiane Marchello-Nizia, “Perlesvaus, le Haut Livre du Graal,” in Régnier-Bohler, p. 121. (English translation mine)

  13Ibid., p. 124. (English translation mine)

  14Barber, p. 112. I find it interesting that these legends were at their most popular in the first half of the thirteenth century, when the crusade against the Cathars was at its height (Barber mentions this) and when anti-Semitism was on the rise, along with the beginning of the libel that Jews stole and desecrated the Host. But that is another subject altogether and I’ll refrain from following it here.

  15Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival tr. Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage (New York: Vintage Books, 1961) book 9, paragraph 470, p. 252.

  16Ibid., book 9, paragraph 471.

  17Joseph Goering, The Virgin and the Grail: Origins of a Legend (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

  18Ibid., p. 223.

  19Ibid., pp. 308-9.

  20Richard Barber, p. 444.

  21Ibid., p. 380. I hope I added it correctly, but that’s the rough amount.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Templars in Denmark: Bornholm Island

  There are no records of any Templar activity in Denmark.1 I realize that recently a book, The Templars’ Secret Island,2 has made a case for the Templars living in round churches on the Danish island of Bornhom, just off the south coast of Sweden. The authors of this book, Elring Haagensen and Henry Lincoln, further state that the Templars used this island for mystical astronomical study. Part of this book contains geometric studies of possible results the Templars might have come up with on Bornholm. But first they give historical background to prove that the scholars are completely wrong in their belief that the Templars never settled in the area. The trouble is the history is based on a few pieces of data and several assumptions that rely on inaccurate information.

  First, let’s look at the “historical” narrative as given in this book and how it doesn’t match known information.

  I have already given a short essay on Bernard of Clairvaux and his connection to the Templars. The story of his life in The Templars’ Secret Island, doesn’t exactly agree with the information I found. In fact, it sometimes directly contradicts it.

  The biography begins with the standard information about Bernard’s birth and entry into the monastery of Citeaux.3 The footnote for this is the Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913. This is the same version that is in the online Catholic Encyclopedia of 1917, which is online because it has been replaced in print by an updated version.4 But it’s essentially the same information concerning Bernard. So far, so good.

  The authors continue to say, as is also well established, that Eudes I, the duke of Burgundy, had donated the funds to keep the monastery going in the early days. The next lines are: “The Burgundian nobility seemed unquestionably to be deeply involved in the Order’s creation. The Abbot of Citeaux was ex officio Prime Counsellor of the Burgundian Parliament with the right to sit at the assembly of the States General of the Kingdom, as well as the Province of Burgundy.”5

  There is no footnote for this piece of news and I am very disappointed because, as far as we know, there was no Burgundian Parliament in 1113. The first one was in 1349 at Beaune.6 The Estates-General of France began as a mandatory meeting attended by members of the nobility, bourgeois, and clergy at the order of the king. This happened now and then in the thirteenth century, but didn’t get going again until the fourteenth century.7 And, of course the Burgundian Parliament, even if it had existed, wouldn’t have mattered to the Estates-General because Burgundy didn’t become a part of France until 1316. Before that it was part of the Holy Roman Empire.8

  I think that if the authors have really discovered that these institutions existed two hundred years before any records have been found for them, they should share their sources. Graduate students the world over are hungry for thesis topics.

  Now, having established in the mind of the reader that the Cistercians were movers and shakers at the court of Burgundy, the authors then go over the history of the foundation of the Templars and Bernard’s part in it (a subject I discussed in the section on Bernard). Then they take the connection another step further, linking Bernard and the Cistercians to the establishment of the crusader kingdoms.

  One statement they make is that “Godfrey of Bouillon and Baudwin [Baldwin, first Latin king of Jerusalem] were of the nobility of Lower Lorraine, the dukedom adjacent to Burgundy and of course, Clairvaux [the monastery founded by Bernard].”9 The authors apparently never bothered to look at a map, odd since so much of the book is based on geographic connections. In the eleventh century, Lorraine was just north of Champagne and affiliated with the county of Flanders. While borders have changed, the land hasn’t moved. Burgundy is, and was, much farther south. Clairvaux, just north of Dijon, was not in existence when the First Crusade took place.10

  From this and other equally inaccurate or unconnected statements, the authors come to the conclusion that Bernard of Clairvaux was “the real—if covert—Grand Master of the Templars.”11It’s true that Bernard was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Templars but I’d need more proof to believe that he directed their actions, especially based on an inaccurate assumption of the secular power of the Cistercians along with a conclusion that relies on mistakes in chronology and geography.

  Let’s move on to the Danish connection.

  Eskil, archbishop of Lund (in Sweden) from 1137 to 1177, was a big fan of Bernard of Clairvaux. Eskil was a progressive bishop in many ways. He has been called “the first European from the North.”12 He came from a rich family in what is now Sweden and was educated in the cathedral schools of Germany.13 His uncle Asser was archbishop of Lund and it is reasonable to think that the family expected Eskil to follow him. Eskil was determined to drag Denmark into the modern world of the twelfth century. This was shown by his enthusiasm for the new religious orders. In the first half of the twelfth century, the Cistercians were the latest thing. Bernard of Clairvaux was arguably the most famous monk in Europe at that time. In 1144, Eskil asked to have a group of Cistercian monks come to Denmark to establish a monastery there and to show Danish monks the customs of the order.14

  Just the year before, at the request of the king and queen of Sweden, the Cistercians had sent monks to start two monasteries in that country.15 They were happy to send monks from Citeaux to Denmark to start the monastery of Herrisvad, as well.

  Eskil’s main goal for his archbishopric was to make it truly Scandinavian, free of its dependence on the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen. 16 Eskil’s uncle Asser had convinced the papal legate under Pope Paschal II (1099-1118) to create the archbishopric of Lund—in Sweden, but Hamburg continued to lobby for its return to German dominance.17 This struggle for primacy was very important to the bishops and archbishops of Europe. A great number of the church councils of the twelfth century spent a large part of their time in the very bitter wrangling over who answered to whom.18

  Eskil was also hampered by th
e problems within the Danish royal succession. This, in turn, was tied to the struggle for the control of the Scandinavian church. In the late 1150s Eskil supported Knut Magnussen for the throne. Knut’s rival was Swein, who was supported by the German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. Frederick’s relative by marriage was Hartwig, archbishop of Bremen, who wanted to return the archbishopric of Lund to submission to Hamberg-Bremen. Now, Pope Hadrian IV (1154-1159) was in conflict with Emperor Frederick about a number of other things. So Eskil was a strong supporter of Pope Hadrian, who returned the support by making Eskil a papal legate.19

  (If you want to take out a notebook and start making diagrams of the connections, I wouldn’t blame you. Use different colored pens; it helps.)

  Eskil had met the pope when he was still called Nicholas Break-spear. The future Hadrian IV was leader of the delegation sent by Pope Eugenius III to set about dividing the Scandinavian archbishopric into two new ones, Sweden and Norway. The pope also wanted to see that the custom of collecting “Peter’s pence,” a tax to support the papacy, was established in the north.20When the delegation arrived in 1152, Eskil was at Clairvaux, meeting with Bernard and collecting more monks for a new Danish monastery.21He returned in time to convince Nicholas not to divide his archbishopric at this time.

  Nicholas was elected pope shortly after his return to Rome in 1154. In 1156 or 1157 Eskil made the journey to Rome, at which time he was made permanent papal legate in Scandinavia.22 However, on the way home, while going through Burgundy (a part of the Holy Roman Empire, see above) he was kidnapped, perhaps by supporters of Emperor Frederick. Pope Hadrian wrote a letter of rebuke to the emperor that was read at an imperial diet held at Besançon in October 1157. Due to a mistranslation of the letter from Latin into German, the emperor took offense and, in the ensuing fuss, Eskil seems to have been forgotten.23 He was released at some point before Hadrian’s death on September 1, 1159.