by James Becker
“Do you want to start work on it tonight?”
“I think we should,” he replied. “We’re probably safe here, lost in a randomly chosen bit of the French countryside, but I have no idea how long that state of affairs will last. Sooner or later the British authorities will extend their search for you outside the borders of the United Kingdom, and eventually those Italians might pick up our trail as well. We’ve got a bit of breathing space at the moment, so I think we should crack on and solve as much as we can of this riddle as soon as possible.”
51
France
The following morning they walked down to the dining room and ate their way through a typical Continental breakfast consisting of bread, croissants, and pastries, washed down with glasses of fresh orange juice and coffee served in huge cups, each probably holding about half a pint.
Sated, at least until lunchtime, they walked back up the stairs to Robin’s room. Mallory booted his laptop and within a few minutes they were once again using the Atbash cipher text to convert the next part of the writing into Latin plaintext. As he started working on it, Robin pointed out something else that had only just occurred to her.
“At last I think I know why that book safe had such a strange title,” she remarked. “Ipse Dixit translates as something like ‘the master has spoken,’ and I think that should be ‘Master’ with a capital M, because quite a lot of what we’ve read so far has been referring to Jacques de Molay, the last grand master, directly or indirectly.”
“That makes sense,” Mallory said, carefully transposing letters from one line to another as he did so. “It does rather read a bit like de Molay’s memoirs, explaining what happened in the last days of the Templar order. I’m just hoping that whatever comes next in this translation will provide a bit more information, because although there’ve been a few revelations, most of what we’ve read so far was already known or at the very least suspected by many historians.”
The last two sentences on the first side of the sheet of parchment were perhaps the most enigmatic of all, and when she read them out Mallory could easily detect the uncertainty in Robin’s voice.
“I hope that you can make a bit more sense of this than I can at the moment. This is the best translation I can come up with from the Latin: ‘Three trials will reveal the heritage and the rebirth, but beware the hounds. Rely two times on him who came before and carried the burden and the rank.’ It’s almost as if this was written by a different person to the rest of the text, somebody who was trying to be deliberately obtuse.”
“It looks to me like the same hand wrote this part of the text as the rest of it, but I quite agree with you. The section we’ve already decoded and translated was quite easy to understand and factual in nature. This isn’t. It looks to me like a deliberate clue, or rather a number of deliberate clues, and my guess is that we’ll have to solve them before we find out exactly what the text is referring to. Anyway, let’s leave those two sentences to one side for the moment and carry on with the other side of the parchment. There may be something in the next piece of writing that will help clarify exactly what these sentences mean.”
But as it turned out, they couldn’t do that, because when Mallory applied the Atbash cipher text to the first line written on the reverse of the parchment, even he could see that the result was pure gibberish. He passed the text over to Robin, but really just so that she could confirm his diagnosis.
“This isn’t Latin,” she confirmed, “and that almost certainly means that the decryption is wrong.”
“I agree. The author has obviously used a different cipher text to encrypt this piece of the writing. I’m afraid we’ll have to start all over again, trying different words associated with the Knights Templar until we finally work out what he’s saying.”
Two hours later, Mallory stood up from the desk where he’d been working and stretched, trying to work the kinks out of his back.
“We need to take a break,” he said. “I’ve tried every word I can think of that might be associated with the Templars, and none of them have worked on the next piece of text. The trouble is, even if I’ve somehow managed to pick the right two or three words, if I haven’t got them in the correct order, the decryption still won’t work. This could take us a hell of a long time to decode.”
“Right,” Robin agreed, glancing at her watch. “Let’s go and grab a bite to eat in the dining room—they’ll be serving lunch by now, I expect—and then take another look at it when we come back.”
They tossed the problem back and forth between them during the meal, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with it. Then Robin suddenly fell silent and fixed her eyes on Mallory, the beginning of a smile playing around her lips.
“We’re going about this the wrong way,” she said. “We were so focused on using words associated with the Templars that we haven’t tried the clue that’s already contained within the parchment itself, in the text on the first side.”
“What clue?” Mallory looked puzzled for a moment, but before Robin could reply he smacked his forehead in frustration as he realized what she was driving at. “You’re right. All that stuff about trials and heritage and dogs, or hounds, or whatever it was. Those two sentences were so obscure and obtuse that the clue to the cipher text more or less has to be in them somewhere.”
Neither of them bothered with a dessert, and they were back in Robin’s bedroom, sitting at the desk in front of Mallory’s laptop computer, a few minutes later.
“Right,” Robin said. “You know far more about the Templars than I ever will, so where do we go from here? It looks to me as if there are four possibly important words in the first sentence—trials, heritage, rebirth, and hounds—but I frankly have no idea what any of those mean, apart from the literal translation, obviously.”
“The bad news,” Mallory replied, “is that I don’t know, either, which obviously isn’t exactly what you wanted to hear. I don’t know what is meant by trials, but I suppose if we apply a bit of logic to the problem, we could reasonably assume that heritage probably just means the legacy of the Templars, if you like, and rebirth might be a suggestion that although the order was purged in 1307 and ended in 1314, it somehow endured and rose again.”
“I didn’t realize it took five years for the Templar order to be dissolved,” Robin said. “I thought all that happened in 1307.”
“No, it was quite a long process. It was officially disbanded by Pope Clement the Fifth in 1312, and the last grand master was executed in 1314. You have to remember that the Templars weren’t subject to secular authority: they answered only to the pope. When King Philip began his program of seizures and arrests, the Templars appealed directly to the Vatican for help, on the reasonable grounds that they owed neither allegiance nor obedience to the king of France, or indeed to any monarch. The problem they had was that Pope Clement the Fifth not only was a very weak pontiff, but was also intimidated by Philip, who bullied him into supporting his actions.
“Even then, the pope refused at first to believe the accusations made against the Templars, and in fact in recent years a document known as the Chinon Parchment was discovered tucked away in the Vatican’s Secret Archives. That document proved conclusively that in 1308 the pope actually absolved the leaders of the Knights Templar of the charges made against them, and in the same year Clement sent another document to King Philip of France telling him that all members of the order who had confessed to heresy had been absolved and welcomed back into the bosom of the Church. Philip, of course, ignored this information and simply increased the pace of his persecutions.
“But eventually the king’s bullying tactics worked, and in 1312 the pope promulgated the papal bull Vox in Excelsis, which formally dissolved the order. What’s quite interesting is that Clement actually expressed his own unhappiness at the action he was taking in that bull, and admitted that there was insufficient evidence to condemn the order, and th
at he was taking that step only for the common good, because of the events that had occurred in France. Anyway, because of the differences of opinion between Philip and Clement, for several years the status of the order remained in something of a limbo, hence the delay in its formal dissolution.”
Robin nodded. “None of that really helps us understand what’s meant by rebirth, though, unless I’m missing something. What about hounds?”
“That’s about the only word that does mean something to me, and especially in the context of that statement. ‘Beware the hounds’ I think is a direct reference to the Dominicans and also, as a matter of interest, helps us to date this parchment. The order was formed in the early twelve hundreds in France by the Spanish priest Saint Dominic de Guzman, and was approved by the pope shortly afterward. The order was established to do two things, both dear to the heart of the Catholic Church at that time. The monks were supposed to preach the gospel, which sounds innocent enough, but also to combat heresy, and that was a much darker side of their activities. Over the years they essentially became the pope’s personal torturers, working in the darkness of castle dungeons and employing ever more sophisticated methods designed to cause the maximum possible amount of pain to the people—both men and women—who fell into their clutches.”
“But how does that help date the parchment?”
“When the order was formed, it was known simply as the Order of Preachers, the Ordo Praedicatorum, and it wasn’t until the fifteenth century that they became commonly known as the Dominicans, after their founder. But when that name became commonly used, somebody realized that it was a sort of pun, and that the word Dominican sounded somewhat similar to Domini canes, which would translate as the ‘Hounds of the Lord.’ And that’s why I think that because the author of this text is telling us to ‘beware of the hounds,’ he has to have been writing no earlier than the fifteenth century.”
“That makes sense, and I suppose the most obvious explanation for the information that the writer has already conveyed in this parchment is that he was drawing on a number of contemporary sources that described what had happened to the Templar order. So at least we know what one of the words in that sentence refers to, assuming you’re right, of course. But I don’t think we’re any further forward in working out what cipher text we should be using to decode the next section.”
Mallory nodded and turned his attention back to the translated text.
“The way I read it,” he said, “I don’t think that first sentence contains the clue that we’re looking for. It looks to me as if that’s just a general statement, maybe outlining a course of action that we need to follow—that could be the meaning of the expression ‘three trials,’ for example—but the second sentence seems to me to be far more specific. ‘Rely two times on him who came before and carried the burden and the rank.’ That’s almost a definitive instruction. So all we need to do now is work out exactly what the writer means by “him who came before.’”
“Easy,” Robin said.
“Really?”
“No, actually. I was making a small joke. But seriously, if that is the clue, then at least we know that we’re looking for a person, for a name, rather than some vague concept or idea that we might never work out. So, who do you think that ‘he who came before’ might refer to?”
“I suppose logic would suggest that the writer is obliquely referring to somebody well-known in the order, and fairly obvious choices there will include people like Jacques de Molay, the last grand master, and maybe the first, Hugues de Payens, as well as some of the other famous names associated with the Knights Templar. Actually,” he added after a pause, “probably not the first grand master, because there would have been nobody ‘coming before him’: by definition, he was the first. I think maybe we’ll start with Jacques de Molay, because so much of the text has been dealing with him and what happened to him at the end in Paris. Perhaps the writer was assuming that we would assume, if you see what I mean, that he was the most important name ever to be associated with the Knights Templar. He’s certainly the one person that everyone who reads about the subject knows.”
Robin nodded.
“So, who came before Jacques de Molay?” she asked.
“I can’t remember,” Mallory replied, “but I’m sure that the Internet will supply the answer in a couple of seconds.”
He opened his browser, typed in “Knights Templar grand masters,” and started the search. Predictably enough, the very first search result was from Wikipedia. Mallory clicked on the link to open the page and then scanned down it until he reached the end of the list of names.
“There you go,” he said. “The last grand master of the order before Jacques de Molay was Thibaud Gaudin. We can try that name and see if it gets us anywhere, but let me just check something else.”
He quickly did another search.
“I thought so,” he said. “If you look at the names of the list of Templar grand masters, you’ll see that most of them are single names with an associated place-name. Bernard de Blanchefort, for example, or Bernard of Blanchefort. I think Blanchefort is a town or village somewhere in Southern France. Thibaud Gaudin was also known as Tibauld de Gaudin, so there are at least two different ways of spelling his name, and it can be with or without the de as well.”
He entered another search term and looked at the results.
“There’s nowhere in France just called ‘Gaudin,’” he said, “but Tibauld was believed to have come from the Loire region, and there are a couple of towns in that area that include the word in their names. And of course one of them might just have been called ‘Gaudin’ in those days.”
“I suppose we’ll just have to try all the possible options,” Robin said. “But what about this burden he was supposed to be carrying? Is there anything on the Web about what that could mean?”
Mallory scanned quickly through one of the articles on Tibauld de Gaudin. “I don’t know if it would count as a ‘burden,’ but it looks as if Tibauld was one of the very few members of the Knights Templar order who managed to escape the fall of Acre in 1291. The night before the fortifications were overrun by the Mamluk besieging army, he sailed away with a number of noncombatants—women and children, presumably—as well as the entire treasure of the Knights Templar in the Holy Land. He wasn’t stealing it, because he held the position of treasurer of the order, and he had been ordered to leave Acre by the marshal of the Knights Templar, a man called Pierre de Sevry, who was then in command of the fortress.
“I don’t know all the details of the siege of Acre, but I do know that almost every Christian who had taken refuge in the Templar fort there was slaughtered by the Mamluks when they finally breached the walls. Reading between the lines, my guess is that de Sevry knew for sure that Acre was doomed, and didn’t want the treasure to fall into the hands of the infidels, so he made certain that it was transported to safety before the final battle began.”
“I think you could describe that as a ‘burden,’” Robin said. “Presumably Tibauld would have been one of the last surviving Knights Templar in the Holy Land, and to be entrusted with the entire wealth of the order would be a massive responsibility. What did he do with it?”
Mallory read on. “The short version is that nobody actually knows. He sailed first to Sidon, and while he was there he was elected grand master following the death of Pierre de Sevry at the end of the siege of Acre. Although the Templars were determined to resist the approaching Mamluk army, they were too few in number to defend the entire city of Sidon, and so they retreated to what was known as the Castle of the Sea. It had been built in the thirteenth century as a fortification just off the coast of Sidon, and was approached by a narrow and easily defended causeway about one hundred yards long.
“But before the Mamluks arrived, Tibauld de Gaudin got back into his ship and sailed off into the Mediterranean, an act that could easily have been interpreted as cowardice,
and which was certainly not what most Templars would have expected their new grand master to do. The other way of looking at it is that de Gaudin knew that the number of defenders in the castle was wholly inadequate to resist the vast Mamluk army, and his plan was to sail to Cyprus to raise enough reinforcements to allow him to return to the Holy Land and drive out the infidels. And, probably, to get the order’s treasure to a place of safety.
“What followed was by all accounts something of a shambles. The Templars who had remained behind in the Castle of the Sea fought as bravely as members of the order invariably did, but when Mamluk engineers began constructing a new and wide causeway to link the castle with the mainland, they accepted that they had no choice but to retreat. They took to their ships and sailed to the city of Tortosa, in Syria. But even that proved too big and too difficult to defend, and later that year both Tortosa and the castle of Athlit were evacuated, the Templars assembling at the small sea fort of Ruad, about two miles off the coast of Tortosa, as their final redoubt. But when Sidon was abandoned, that realistically marked the end of the presence of the Knights Templar in the Holy Land.”
“I take it that Tibauld didn’t raise any reinforcements, then?” Robin asked.
“Correct. He apparently did almost nothing on Cyprus. In fairness to him, he did have other problems, including trying to defend the Kingdom of Armenia from Turkish forces, and there were domestic difficulties on Cyprus as well, because of an influx of refugees. He was probably also not a well man, because he died the following year, 1292, and it looks as if all mention of the Templar treasure of Acre died with him. Interestingly, at the same meeting of the hierarchy of the Knights Templar that confirmed Tibauld’s appointment in October 1291, a senior knight named Jacques de Molay was named marshal of the order, succeeding Pierre de Sevry. He, of course, then became the grand master of the order after Tibauld’s death.”
