The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  2 One of the original nine knights, André de Montbard (who later became the fifth Grand Master), was an uncle of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux25 – who was himself a native of Champagne. This enormously influential cleric had taken a special interest both in Gothic architecture and in the Grail romances.26

  3 The city of Troyes, so close to the birthplace of Hugh de Payens, the first Templar Grand Master, was also the home of Chrétien de Troyes, the ‘inventor’ of the Holy Grail.

  4 Hugh de Payens was a cousin of the Count of Champagne,27 and, in the year 1125, the Count of Champagne joined the Templars.28

  5 When Chrétien de Troyes rose to prominence rather later in the twelfth century his principal patron was the Countess of Champagne.29

  Noting this string of coincidences with some interest, I went on to learn more about the early history of the Templars.

  There was much that was strange. Perhaps strangest of all, however, was the way in which the nine original knights were received by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem in 1119. As soon as they had arrived in the Holy City they told him that they wanted to establish their headquarters on the Temple Mount30 – where the monarch had recently converted the Al-Aqsa Mosque to serve as his own royal palace. Rather astonishingly he complied at once with their request, giving them, for their exclusive use, a large part of the former mosque and its outbuildings immediately adjacent to the famous ‘Dome of the Rock’, which marked the site where Solomon’s Temple had once stood.31

  Thereafter, like latter-day archaeologists with an important dig to complete, the knights lived, ate, slept and worked on this uniquely precious site: indeed for almost seven years after their arrival they rarely left it and adamantly refused admission to any outside party. In public pronouncements they had declared that their mission in the Holy Land was to ‘to keep the road from the coast to Jerusalem free from bandits’.32 I could find no evidence, however, to suggest that they took any steps to fulfil this mission during those first seven years of their existence; on the contrary, as one authority put it, ‘the new Order apparently did very little’ in this period.33 Besides, simple logic suggested that nine men could hardly have protected anybody on a highway almost fifty miles long – and their number stayed at nine until they were joined by the Count of Champagne in 1125. Moreover, the members of an older and far larger military order – the Knights of Saint John – were already doing the job of protecting pilgrims when the Templars arrived.34

  I could only conclude, therefore, that Hugh de Payens and his colleagues must have had some other, undeclared, purpose. As noted above, they largely confined themselves to the precincts of the Temple Mount during the first seven years of their sojourn in Jerusalem – and this suggested very strongly that their real motive must have had to do with that very special site.

  From the beginning their behaviour was secretive and I found, as a result, that there was no really hard evidence about what they had been up to there. It seemed at least possible, however, that they might have been looking for something, and this suspicion deepened when I learned that they had indeed used their occupancy of the Temple Mount to conduct quite extensive excavations.

  Because the Temple Mount today contains the third and fourth most sacred sites of Islam – the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque – modern archaeologists have never been permitted to work there. In recent years, however, Israeli teams have operated freely immediately to the south of the Mount, and there they found the exit-point of a tunnel which they identified as having being dug by the Templars in the twelfth century.35 In their official report the archaeologists stated:

  The tunnel leads inward for a distance of about thirty metres from the southern wall before being blocked by pieces of stone and debris. We know that it continues further, but we had made it a hard-and-fast rule not to excavate within the bounds of the Temple Mount, which is currently under Moslem jurisdiction, without first acquiring the permission of the appropriate Moslem authorities. In this case they permitted us only to measure and photograph the exposed section of the tunnel, not to conduct an excavation of any kind. Upon concluding this work … we sealed up the tunnel’s exit with stones.36

  And that was all that was known, or could be said, about the Templar tunnel. The archaeologists had only been able to confirm that it continued further than they themselves had been allowed to go. Extending inwards from the southern wall, however, I realized that it might well have penetrated into the very heart of the sacred precincts, quite possibly passing directly beneath the Dome of the Rock a hundred or so metres to the north of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

  The Dome of the Rock, I discovered, was so named because within it lay a huge stone, known to the Jews as the Shetiyyah (literally the ‘Foundation’). When the Temple of Solomon had been erected on this exact spot in the mid-900s BC, the Ark of the Covenant had been placed on the Shetiyyah, which had formed the floor of the Holy of Holies.37 Then, in 587 BC, the Temple had been destroyed by the Babylonians and most of the population of Jerusalem had been carried off into exile. There was no evidence, however, to suggest that the conquerors had also carried off the Ark; on the contrary, it appeared to have vanished into thin air.38

  Subsequently a legend began to circulate which provided a possible explanation for what had happened – an explanation that was accepted by most Jews. According to this legend, only moments before the Babylonian looters had burst into the Holy of Holies, the sacred relic had been hidden away in a sealed and secret cavern directly beneath the Shetiyyah.39

  Expressed as it was in a variety of Talmudic and Midrashic scrolls, and in the popular apocalypse known as the ‘Vision of Baruch’40 – all of which were still very much in circulation in Jerusalem in the twelfth century AD – it occurred to me that the Templars might easily have learned the details of this intriguing legend. Moreover, with a little further research, I was able to establish that they could well have done so some years before 1119 – the date of their official arrival in Jerusalem. Hugh de Payens, the founder of the order, had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1104 in the company of the Count of Champagne.41 The two men had then returned to France and were known to have been together there in 1113.42 Three years later Hugh went back to the Holy Land alone43 and then returned once more – this time to gather together the eight knights who travelled with him in 1119 and who formed the nucleus of the Templar order.

  The more I thought about this sequence of events the more likely it seemed to me that Hugh and the Count of Champagne could, on their 1104 pilgrimage, have heard of the startling possibility that the Ark of the Covenant might lie concealed somewhere within the Temple Mount. If so, I speculated, then was it not also probable that they could have formulated a plan to try to recover the sacred relic? And did this not explain the determined manner in which the nine knights had taken control of the Temple Mount in 1119 – and also the many other curiosities of their behaviour in the early years of the order’s existence?

  I found tangential support for this conjecture in Emma Jung’s authoritative study of the Grail legend. There, in an excursus, the psychoanalyst argued that the European occupation of Jerusalem in the twelfth century had been inspired, at least in part, by a belief that some puissant, sacred and incalculably precious relic lay concealed in that city. As she commented:

  This deeply-rooted concept of hidden treasure contributed to the fact that the summons to liberate the Holy Sepulchre awakened a resounding echo [and] imparted [an] inflammatory motive power to the Crusades – if it did not actually cause them.44

  There could have been no treasure more precious or more sacred than the lost Ark of the Covenant – which, in a century that was unusually obsessed with the recovery of religious relics,45 could well have looked like the ultimate prize. It therefore seemed to me not just possible, but actually highly probable, that Hugh de Payens and his backer the Count of Champagne could indeed have been motivated by a desire to find the Ark – and that they could have established the Templars, and taken control o
f the Temple Mount, in order to achieve this goal.

  If so, however, then they failed in their objective. In the twelfth century, as one expert put it, ‘the asset value of a famous relic was prodigious’.46 Possession of a relic as uniquely significant as the Ark of the Covenant would, in addition, have brought enormous power and prestige to its owners. From this it followed, that if the Templars had found the Ark, they would certainly have brought it back to Europe in triumph. Since that had not happened it seemed to me quite safe to conclude that they had not found it.

  Yet rumours persisted that they had found something in their seven years of intensive digging on the Temple Mount. None of these rumours had any academic authority whatsoever – but some were intriguing. According to one mystical work, which attempted to address what the Templars had really been up to in Jerusalem between 1119 and 1126:

  The real task of the nine knights was to carry out research in the area in order to obtain certain relics and manuscripts which contained the essence of the secret traditions of Judaism and ancient Egypt, some of which probably went back to the days of Moses … There is no doubt that [they] fulfilled this particular mission and that the knowledge obtained from their finds was taught in the oral tradition of the Order’s … secret circles.47

  No documentary proof was offered to back up this attractive assertion. In the same source, however, I was interested to note a name that I had come across several times before in my research – Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who here was said (again without any supporting evidence) to have sent the nine knights to Jerusalem.48

  I already knew that Bernard had been the nephew of one of the nine founder knights. I was also aware that he had joined the Cistercian order in 1112, that he had become an abbot by 111549 and that he had risen to a position of considerable prominence in French religious circles by 1119 when the first Templars had arrived in Jerusalem. I therefore thought that it would be most unwise to dismiss out of hand the possibility that he might have played some role in the formulation of their mission. This suspicion intensified considerably when I began to look into what had happened to the Templars after their first curious seven years.

  A trade-off?

  Late in 1126 Hugh de Payens suddenly left Jerusalem and returned to Europe accompanied by none other than André de Montbard,50 the uncle of Saint Bernard. The knights arrived in France in 1127 and, in January 1128, participated in what was to be the most significant event in the early history of the Templars. That event was the Synod of Troyes, which had been convened with the explicit objective of procuring the Church’s official backing for the Templar order.51

  Three things particularly interested me about this important meeting. First, it took place in the home town of the poet who, some years later, was to invent the Holy Grail; second, it was presided over by Saint Bernard, in his capacity as its secretary;52 and third, during the course of the Synod, it was Bernard himself who drew up the formal Rule of the Knights Templar that, henceforth, was to guide the evolution and development of the order.53

  If my suspicions were justified, therefore, it seemed that the original nine knights had initially been preoccupied with their excavations on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Whatever else they might have unearthed there, however, it had become clear to them by 1126 that they were not going to find the prime object of their search, the Ark of the Covenant. This realization had made it necessary for them to consider their future: specifically, having lost their raison d’être, should they simply cease to exist as an order, or should they try to forge ahead?

  History showed that they had indeed suffered a crisis of identity in 1126, that they had resolved it and decided to forge ahead, and that they had enlisted the powerful support of Saint Bernard in this enterprise. At the Synod of Troyes he drew up their Rule and obtained the full backing of the Church for their expansion. And thereafter, in a series of sermons and glowing panegyrics such as De laude novae militae,54 he vigorously promoted the young order – thus using his own prestige and influence to guarantee its success.

  The results were spectacular. New recruits flocked in from all over France and later from many other parts of Europe as well. Donations of land and money were received from wealthy patrons, and political power quickly followed. By the late twelfth century the order had become phenomenally rich, was operating a sophisticated international banking system,55 and owned properties throughout the known world.

  And all this, in a sense, it owed to the intervention of Saint Bernard in 1128 – and to his continued solidarity and support in the years that followed. Had he played this role on behalf of the Templars purely out of a sense of altruism? Or had they perhaps given him something in return?

  Remembering that the 1130s were the decade in which Gothic architecture had suddenly and mysteriously burst upon the scene in France, remembering that Bernard had been a prime mover in the dissemination of the Gothic formula, and remembering too the persistent rumours that the Templars had gained access in Jerusalem to some deep and ancient source of knowledge, I could not help but wonder if this had been the trade-off. To be sure, the knights had failed to find the Ark of the Covenant. But what if, in their excavations on the Temple Mount, they had unearthed scrolls, manuscripts, theorems or blueprints relating to Solomon’s Temple itself? What if these discoveries had included the lost architectural secrets of geometry, proportion, balance and harmony that had been known to the builders of the pyramids and other great monuments of antiquity? And what if the Templars had shared these secrets with Saint Bernard in return for his enthusiastic backing for their order?

  These speculations were not entirely without foundation. On the contrary, one of the oddities of the Templars was the fact that they had been great architects. In 1139, Pope Innocent II (whose candidacy, incidentally, had also been enthusiastically backed by Saint Bernard56), granted the order a unique privilege – the right to build their own churches.57 This was a privilege that they subsequently exercised to the full: beautiful places of worship, often circular in plan like the Temple Church in London, became a hallmark of Templar activities.

  The knights also excelled in military architecture and their castles in Palestine were exceptionally well designed and virtually impregnable. Foremost amongst these imposing fortresses was Adit (Château Pélérin or Castle Pilgrim) which, I discovered, had been built in the year 1218 by the fourteenth Grand Master of the Templars, William of Chartres58 – in whose name was revealed yet another connection to the great Gothic cathedral.

  Standing to the south of Haifa on a spur of land surrounded on three sides by the sea, Adit in its heyday was well supplied with orchards, fresh water, and vegetable gardens and even possessed its own harbour and ship-yard together with a jetty two hundred feet long. Often besieged by the Saracens but never captured, it had been capable of sheltering as many as four thousand people. Its massive walls, resting on unusually deep foundations, were more than ninety feet high and sixteen feet thick59 – and were so well made that large sections of them still survive intact. The site was thoroughly excavated by the archaeologist C. N. Johns in 1932. He concluded that the skills of the Templar architects and masons had been astonishingly advanced by comparison with the norm in the Middle Ages and had, indeed, been ‘exceptional’ even by modern standards.60

  The Templars also built extensively in Jerusalem where they continued to maintain their headquarters on the Temple Mount until the Holy City was recaptured by the Muslim general Saladin in 1187. I learned that a German monk named Theoderic had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1174 – at which time he reported that all the buildings within the precincts of the Dome of the Rock were still ‘in the possession of the Templar soldiers’.61 He added:

  They are garrisoned in these and other buildings belonging to them … Below them they have stables once erected by King Solomon … with vaults, arches, and roofs of many varieties … According to our estimation they will hold ten thousand horses with grooms.62

  In fact the ‘stables�
� had not been erected by King Solomon, but dated back to the reign of Herod the Great (around the time of Christ). The vaults, arches and roofs, however, had been the work of the Templars themselves, who greatly extended these subterranean halls and who were the first and only people to use them to accommodate horses.63

  Theoderic’s eyewitness account of the Temple Mount in 1174 continued with these words:

  On the other side of the palace [i.e. the Al-Aqsa Mosque] the Templars have built a new house, whose height, length and breadth, and all its cellars and refectories, staircase and roof, are far beyond the custom of this land. Indeed its roof is so high that, if I were to mention how high it is, those who listen would hardly believe me.64

  The ‘new house’ that Theoderic had referred to in 1174 was, unfortunately, knocked down in the 1950s during some renovations undertaken on the Temple Mount by the Muslim authorities. The German monk’s testimony was, however, valuable in itself – and what I found most valuable about it was its breathless tone. Clearly he had regarded the Templars’ architectural skills as almost supernaturally advanced and had been particularly impressed by the soaring roofs and arches that they had built. Reviewing his statements I thought it far from accidental that soaring roofs and arches had also been the distinguishing features of the Gothic architectural formula as expressed at Chartres and other French cathedrals in the twelfth century – cathedrals that I knew were regarded by some observers as ‘scientifically … far beyond what can be allowed for in the knowledge of the epoch’.65

  And this brought me back again to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Looking more thoroughly into what was known about his life and ideas, I was able to confirm my earlier impression that his influence on the iconography of the Gothic cathedrals had been massive, but indirect, taking the form mainly of groups of sculptures and of stained-glass windows that had been inspired by his sermons and writings, often after his death.66 Indeed, in his lifetime, Bernard had frequently opposed the unnecessary proliferation of images and had stated: ‘There must be no decoration, only proportion.’67