by Jay Weidner
Godfroi wasn’t the only noble of ancient lineage taking the cross that summer. The group was officially under the leadership of the bishop of Le Puy, Adhemar, as papal legate, and included Raymond of Toulouse, a veteran of the Spanish wars; Hugh of Vermandois and Robert II of Flanders; and Robert, duke of Normandy, and his brother-in-law, the hapless Stephan, count of Blois. In September of 1096, word reached Urban that the Normans of southern Italy and Sicily were ready to take up the cross. These Normans, led by Bohemund and his nephew Tancred, brought the most experienced and capable soldiers in Europe to the crusading movement. Bohemund’s father, Roger of Guiscard, had almost conquered Constantinople itself a few years before, and the Normans scented opportunity in the call to the East.
The long story of the First Crusade, and its People’s Crusade prologue, is told in many places. The best of all the histories is still Sir Steven Runciman’s multivolume work on the entire crusading era.17 For our purposes, we shall concentrate on Peter the Hermit and his student Godfroi de Bouillon.
The People’s Crusade, after a tortuous journey across central Europe, arrived at the gates of Constantinople in the spring of 1097, a hungry and uncontrollable mob. The emperor shipped them over to the Asian side of the straits, where they rashly attacked a Turkish stronghold and were annihilated. Peter the Hermit wisely stayed in Constantinople and therefore survived. He was still there, and held in some honor, when the next wave of Crusaders arrived.
As the crusading princes gathered in Constantinople, Peter joined them with the remnants of his army. Perhaps because of his old association with Godfroi, by this point the acknowledged leader of the Crusade, Peter was respected as a visionary and councilor to the group. He marched on with them to Antioch, where he played a part in the drama of the Holy Spear, a bizarre intervention of the supernatural involving the discovery of an iron spearhead in the church. After Antioch, Peter joined with the Tafars, or poor ones, in calling for a speedy advance on Jerusalem.
After the fall of Jerusalem, Peter was one of the secret council, perhaps even its leader, who chose Godfroi as the king of Jerusalem. Godfroi declined the title, preferring instead that of Defender of the Holy Sepulchre, but in 1100 his younger brother, Baldwin, accepted the title readily. During Godfroi’s reign, Peter the Hermit was held in such high regard that when the Crusaders pushed on to Ascalon, he was left in charge of Jerusalem. Before Godfroi left Jerusalem, almost his sole official act as king was to reconfirm the charter of an abbey on Mount Zion, south of the city and outside of its walls, and order its immediate fortification.
Peter the Hermit divided his time between the court at Constantinople and the newly rebuilt abbey on Mount Zion, where he is believed to have died, in 1115. The great French historian of the Crusades, René Grousset, commented that Godfroi’s throne was founded on the rock of Zion, and that it indicated a royal tradition equal to that of the reigning dynasties of Europe. Grousset, however, does not explain his comment, leaving of us to speculate on its meaning.18
Urban’s plans for military aid for the Eastern Church were subverted by Peter the Hermit and his followers’ insistence on a people’s crusade. This popular movement swept control of the expedition out of papal hands and into the hands of military and political leaders. When Adhemar, the papal legate, died at Antioch, a council of such leaders took over. Peter was a part of that council and was perhaps instrumental in electing Godfroi king. The First Crusade changed from a papal expedition to something different, a popular movement with millenarian expectations, and Peter the Hermit was at the heart of that change.
If Peter was indeed a high-ranking member of one of the surviving chronicling orders started by Sylvester II, who were charged with researching the Merovingian bloodline, then his influence becomes understandable. Sylvester’s chronicling orders had been working for almost a century to create a new kingdom of Jerusalem, and then, suddenly, the means were at hand. All that was needed was a candidate for king whose bloodline was such that all the kings of Europe could acknowledge him as overlord.
Godfroi may have filled the bill because the Chroniclers believed him to be a descendant of the lost line of Merovingian kings and therefore perhaps a direct descendant of Solomon and the House of David, and perhaps even Jesus himself. That would in fact, if proved, make him the rightful king of Jerusalem, and perhaps of the world. It would at least fulfill a great many apocalyptic expectations and could be seen as the first steps toward the Kingdom of Heaven on earth so beloved of the chiliasts.
The rock of Zion could be Peter (petros, or “rock” in Greek) the Hermit of the Order of Zion, to whom both Godfroi and Baldwin directly owed their thrones. This explanation becomes even more plausible if Peter, as the official representative of Zion and the Chroniclers, thus functioned as guarantor of their legitimacy as descendants of the Davidic line. Mount Zion itself seems the most likely candidate for the location of the original order. Al-Hakim donated to Sylvester’s Chroniclers a Greek church somewhere outside the walls, but still close enough for access to the city. Mount Zion, which contains the ruins of a fourth-century basilica rebuilt in the early eleventh century, seems the most obvious choice. A group of monks were apparently still there in 1099, and may have played a part in the fall of the city. This “rock of Zion” and its connections in Europe could also be considered the foundation of the dynasty. But, as we shall see, there could in fact be another “rock of Zion” on which the kingdom of Jerusalem was built.
THE SECRET OF THE KNIGHTS OF THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON
The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail deserve credit for their discoveries concerning the role played by the Order, or Priory, of Zion in the creation of the Templars. Just as they were right about the unusual and probably Hebraic origins of the Merovingians, they were correct, as far as they went, about the mysterious precursors to the Templars who occupied Mount Zion. While not going back far enough to uncover the pivotal role played by Pope Sylvester II, Holy Blood, Holy Grail’s facts about the Order of Our Lady of Zion are suggestive.
By the time the Templars arrived on the scene, in 1118 or 1119, the Order of Zion was already a powerful group with close ties to the kings of Jerusalem. These ties were based, in all probability, on the order’s knowledge of the dynasty’s true heritage. Therefore, the secret at the heart of the Templars’ sudden rise in the medieval world was due to more than just, as Holy Blood, Holy Grail suggests, knowledge of Jesus’ descendants. Once again something more is involved.
The missing piece appears to be alchemy. The Merovingians, whether or not they were descended from Christ, were indeed practical alchemists and wizard kings. Sylvester II, the hermetic pope, was on the verge of recovering the secret when power politics overwhelmed him.19 The motivation for the First Crusade, deeply hidden behind religious and political rationalizations, was actually the search for and recovery of the secret, envisioned perhaps as an artifact or relic. A Merovingian king on the throne of Jerusalem was just the first step in bringing about the millennium. Next would come the rebuilding of the Temple, based on the philosopher’s stone, the stone the builders rejected.
This was the true mission of the Templars, and Holy Blood, Holy Grail is partly correct. The secret did involve the bloodline. The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail rarely mention alchemy, however, even though several supposed grand masters of Zion are prominent alchemists. Only once in the entire book does alchemy come to the forefront: in discussing the Templars and their mysterious “head.” Whatever the Templars were trying to accomplish, the recovery of a lost secret was the central and critical component of their plans.20
By the end of the second decade of the twelfth century, most of the veterans of the First Crusade were dead. Godfroi de Bouillon, exhausted by his labors, died the year after the fall of Jerusalem, in 1100. Peter the Hermit had died in 1115, and Baldwin I, Godfroi’s brother, followed him in 1118. Things were changing in Outremer, the land beyond the sea, as the Franks called Palestine. Latin kingdoms, including Jerusalem, had been
established from Syria to Gaza, but if they were to remain independent, it was time to look to their collective security.
With this in mind, soon after his coronation, Baldwin II, cousin of Godfroi and Baldwin, legitimized the only standing army in the Holy Land. Not being a truly feudal lord, in the sense that Europe understood it, the king of Jerusalem had only his personal retainers and whatever Crusaders happened to be available with whom to form an army. This left the kingdom of Jerusalem somewhat defenseless, as demonstrated by the Easter massacre of pilgrims by Turkish forces in 1119. As a reaction to this, Baldwin II turned to the only organized military force in the Holy Land, the militia of the Order of Our Lady of Zion, for protection.
That this milice du Christ existed before 1119 is shown by the reference to it in a letter from the bishop of Chartres to Hugh, count of Champagne, dated 1114. In the period immediately after the First Crusade’s conquest of Jerusalem, the only source of authority in the devastated city came from the remaining religious communities, among them the Order of Mount Zion. We know that Peter the Hermit was left in charge of the city while Godfroi went on to defeat the Egyptians at Ascalon, which, if Peter was a monk of Zion, meant that the order was actually in control. That the existing Order of Mount Zion had some military value is shown by Godfroi’s insistence on repairing its fortifications. Someone must have manned those defenses after they were built.
Given the unstable situation in Outremer, Baldwin II made the right choice. He recognized the military arm of the order, put them under the control of the king and the patriarch of Jerusalem, and installed them close at hand, next door to his palace on Temple Mount. The Poor Knights of Christ, as they called themselves, gained another name from Baldwin’s gift. They became the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, then Knights of the Temple, or Knights Templar, and, finally, the Templars. Their stated purpose was to protect the pilgrim routes, but their numbers were too few in the beginning to protect more than the area around the Temple ruins. And perhaps that’s all they were intended to do.
To understand the Templars and their role in the Holy Land and Europe, we must see them in their proper perspective, that of a military adjunct to a much older organization. The Order of Our Lady of Zion did not create the Templars. The king of Jerusalem created them out of the order’s militia for a specific purpose.
The order itself had been reconfirmed and given its new name by Godfroi in 1099. Five years later, a private conclave of nobles and clergy assembled at Troyes, the court of the count of Champagne, to hear a mysterious abbot from Jerusalem and to discuss conditions in the Holy Land. Nothing is known of the subject of that discussion, but whatever it was, the wealthy and powerful Hugh, count of Champagne, decided to depart immediately for Jerusalem. He spent the next four years in the Holy Land, his activities and whereabouts unknown.
The location of the conclave in Troyes is highly significant. Peter the Hermit had stopped there on his winter preaching tour in 1096, and the family of the count of Champagne had been of interest to the Chroniclers because of its connections with the Merovingian dynasty of Burgundy. Indeed, the reported nobles who attended the conclave, Brienne, Joinville, Chaumont, and Montbard, all have connections to the ancient Burgundian royal family. This alone would be enough to make one suspect that the mysterious Jerusalem abbot was from the Order of Zion.
Hugh, count of Champagne, remained in the Holy Land for four years. On his return to Champagne, things began to unfold rapidly. A distant relative, Bernard de Montbard, joined the Cistercian Order. Bernard, in just a few years, would become the principle spiritual leader of Western Christendom. His abbey at Clairvaux, donated by Hugh in 1112, became the center of the medieval spiritual revival, inspiring a wave of religious feeling that resulted in the glories of the Gothic cathedrals. Saint Bernard, as he would come to be known, played a key role in the establishment and the legitimization of the Templars. His uncle André de Montbard was one of the militia of Zion from which the Templars were formed.
Hugh of Champagne himself wanted to return to the Holy Land and join the order’s militia. The letter from the bishop of Chartres in 1114 was part of an attempt to dissuade him. Apparently his talents were needed in Champagne, and it was not until 1124 that he officially joined the newly renamed Order of the Temple. By that time, the Templars were solidly established with the support of a now wealthy and powerful Cistercian Order, headed by Bernard. In 1128, the Templars were recognized by the pope, Honorius II, and given a written rule or guide for their order by none other than Bernard himself. The council at which this occurred was held, of course, in Troyes at the court of the count of Champagne.
From these meager facts we are forced to intuit the story. The Order of the Chroniclers on Mount Zion appears to be the shadowy force directing the First Crusade, mostly through the activities and influence of Peter the Hermit. After the Crusaders captured Jerusalem, the order, through Peter, was left in virtual charge of the city and its monuments and churches. As we have seen, Godfroi and Baldwin were beholden to Zion for their thrones, and therefore would have allowed the order free access to anywhere in the city they wanted to explore or excavate. Sometimes during the five years from the conquest to the conclave in Troyes, the order discovered the secret it had been seeking for over a century.
Zion sent word of this discovery back to Europe, not to Rome or any of the other capitals, but to Troyes. Whatever this discovery was, it so moved Hugh that he left for Jerusalem and spent four years in secret studying it. Immediately after his return in 1108, the wheels of power moved so that one of his adherents, the young Bernard of Montbard, became the head of an orthodox monastic order. When Bernard joined the Cistercians, they were almost bankrupt. Within a decade they were the wealthiest monastic order in Europe, with money to fund the creation of a whole new style of architecture, the Gothic cathedrals.21
Therefore, in some way, this discovery of a secret or an artifact led to a flow of unparalleled wealth a few years later. From this discovery and its flow of wealth would come the need for the Templars, whose first and basic activity seemed to be guarding the precinct of Solomon’s Temple. But the mere secrets of alchemy alone, even an ancient Solomonic version, would not of themselves produce a flow of wealth. Something else was required. As the later alchemists inform us, nothing can be accomplished in the Great Work without the right prima materia. It is possible that what the Order of Zion found, perhaps in the ruins of the Temple of Solomon, was the best prima materia possible, a piece of the Black Stone, the meteorite from Mecca.22 Just possibly, this was the true “rock of Zion” on which the kingdom of Jerusalem was founded.
Some modern authors tracing the Templar connection with alchemy have suggested that the Templars discovered the Ark of the Covenant in the ruins of Solomon’s Temple, which perhaps contained a stone from heaven, or meteorite, similar to the Black Stone of Mecca.23 This, however, seems highly unlikely, given that the Ark disappeared from the temple in the seventh century B.C.E.24 But a discovery of something like one of the stones contained in the Ark is a somewhat more likely proposition.
The Order of Chroniclers was given the use of Mount Zion by the mad caliph al-Hakim. Al-Hakim’s great-grandfather, al-Mansur, was the first and only person since Muhammad known to have close personal contact with the Black Stone. It stayed in his presence for months after it was presented to him and before it was returned to the Kaaba. Most significant, we cannot be sure how much of the stone was returned.
The Iranian Ismailis, soon to become friends and allies of the Templars, may have kept a piece before it was given to al-Mansur. The Fatimid caliph himself may have decided to keep a piece. That the stone shrank in its absence from the Kaaba is known from Muslim descriptions of the building of the ninth and tenth Kaabas, which tell us that the stone was large and filled the entire space of the southeast corner, protruding so that one did not have to stoop to kiss it. In the current Kaaba, as described by Sir Richard Francis Burton in the nineteenth century, the stone is encase
d within the wall, leaving only a portion about seven inches long and four inches wide exposed for kissing. Since it was removed from the Kaaba only for those brief years in the midtenth century, any carving or splitting of the stone had to have been done at that time.25
The madness of al-Hakim can be explained by his possession of his great-grandfather’s chunk of the stone. Shi’ite tradition claimed that at the turn of the fourth century after the Hejira, or departure from Mecca, the Mahdi, or savior, would appear and convert the entire world to Islam as a prologue to the Day of Judgment. In 1020, al-Hakim, the foremost Shi’ite leader of his day, announced the arrival of the Mahdi in his own, now divine, person.26 It was the year 400 A.H. If indeed al-Hakim had a piece of the rock, sign of the holy covenant with Abraham, then it is possible that this knowledge could have unhinged the caliph enough for him to convince himself of his own divinity. Fearing the stone’s power, al-Hakim could have hidden it on the Dome of the Rock, perhaps within the ruins of Solomon’s Temple, in Jerusalem.
If the stone was in Jerusalem the whole time, why did it take a Crusade for the Order of Zion to gain possession of it? One reason lies in the madness of al-Hakim. As part of his Mahdi-hood, he persecuted the Christians and the Jews, burning their churches and synagogues. Even though he repented of the destruction before his death or disappearance, access to the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount itself was restricted to Muslims from that time onward. Once the Seljuk Turks conquered the city, all access to the Holy Sites was restricted. And at that point, Peter, the Hermit of Mount Zion, departed for the West to start the political process that, eleven years later, would bring the order back into control of the Temple and the Dome of the Rock.
