The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  This emphasis on proportion, harmony and balance in architecture was, I knew, the key to the strange magic of Gothic architecture and, as I became more familiar with Saint Bernard’s thinking, I realized that it was in this area that his influence on the design of Chartres and other cathedrals had been most profound. In those great edifices, the introduction of a number of remarkable technical innovations like ribbed vaulting, ogive arches and flying buttresses had enabled the builders to use geometrical perfection to give expression to complex religious ideas. Indeed, in a very real sense, it seemed that architecture and faith had merged in twelfth-century Gothic to form a new synthesis. This synthesis had been summed up by Saint Bernard himself when he had asked ‘What is God?’ – and had then replied to his own rhetorical question with these surprising words: ‘He is length, width, height and depth.’68

  Gothic architecture, as I already knew, had been born at Chartres cathedral with the start of construction work on the north tower in 1134. This, I now learned, was no accident. In the years immediately prior to 1134 Bernard had cultivated a particularly close friendship with Geoffrey the Bishop of Chartres,69 inspiring him with an ‘uncommon enthusiasm’ for the Gothic formula70 and holding ‘almost daily negotiations with the builders themselves’.71

  Interesting though it was in itself, the great significance of this piece of information for my purposes lay in the fact that ‘the years immediately prior to 1134’ were also the years immediately after the Synod of Troyes, at which Saint Bernard had obtained official Church recognition for the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. Historians had never been able to account adequately for the sudden way in which Gothic architecture had emerged in France in the 1130s. But my earlier speculation that the Templars might have had a hand in it now looked increasingly plausible. Reviewing all the evidence I had gathered I felt satisfied that they could indeed have unearthed on the Temple Mount some repository of ancient knowledge concerning the science of building, and that they could have passed on what they had learned to Saint Bernard in return for his support.

  Moreover Templar interest in the Ark of the Covenant, and the Templar connections with Wolfram and with Chartres, also rather neatly tied together the two cryptic ‘maps’ that I believed I had identified (one carved in stone in the north porch of the cathedral, the other encoded in the plot of Parzival). Those ‘maps’ had appeared to suggest that Ethiopia was the last resting place of the Ark. The question I now needed to address, therefore, was this: how could the Templars have come to the conclusion that the sacred relic (which they had failed to find after seven years of digging in Jerusalem) had in fact been removed to Ethiopia? What could have led them to think this way?

  A possible answer, I discovered, lay in Jerusalem itself – where an exiled Ethiopian prince had sojourned for a quarter of a century before returning to his homeland to claim his kingdom in 1185.72 Not much more than a decade later Wolfram began to write his Parzival and work started on the north porch of Chartres cathedral.

  An Ethiopian prince in Jerusalem

  The name of the prince who had spent so long in exile in Jerusalem was Lalibela. I became interested in him because of the ‘letter of Prester John’ referred to in the last chapter. That letter had been written in 1165 and I knew that in 1177 Pope Alexander III had written a letter of his own to ‘Prester John’ in response to a request from ‘the Prester’s’ emissaries for the concession of an altar and a chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘the only real person’ to whom the Pope’s letter could have been sent was the King of Ethiopia.73 I had therefore naturally wondered which king had sat on the Ethiopian throne in 1177. On researching the matter I had discovered that it had been a man named Harbay and that the concession requested had not been granted to him but rather to his successor, Lalibela.

  Neither Harbay nor Lalibela had stemmed from the line of monarchs supposedly descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba through Menelik I. Instead they had both belonged to a usurper dynasty known as the Zagwe which had ruled in Ethiopia from roughly ad 1030 until 1270 when the Solomonids were finally restored to the throne.74

  This was a period of Ethiopian history about which very little was known. I was able to confirm, however, that the Solomonic line had been interrupted around AD 980 and that this coup d’état had been the work of a tribal chieftainess named Gudit, who adhered to the Jewish faith and who seemed to have been motivated above all else by a desire to obliterate the Christian religion. At any rate she attacked Axum, razed much of the ancient city to the ground, and succeeded in killing its Solomonic emperor. Two of the royal princes were also murdered but a third escaped with his life and fled to the province of Shoa, far to the south, where he married and produced children, thus ensuring the survival of the old dynasty, although in much reduced circumstances.75

  Gudit was the head of a large tribal confederation known as the Agaw – to which the Falashas, the indigenous black Jews of Ethiopia, also belonged.76 Although it was by no means certain that she had left any direct successor, historians accepted that within fifty years of her death most of northern Ethiopia had been united under the Zagwe monarchs who, like her, were all of Agaw extraction.

  In its early days this dynasty could – again like Gudit – have been Jewish.77 If so, however (and the case was not proved), it had certainly converted to Christianity well before the birth of Prince Lalibela – which took place in the ancient mountain town of Roha, in what is now the province of Wollo, around the year 1140.

  The younger half-brother of King Harbay, Lalibela appeared to have been destined for greatness from the moment when his mother saw a dense swarm of bees surrounding him as he lay in his crib. Recalling an old belief that the animal world could foretell the future of important personages, the legends said that she had been seized by the spirit of prophecy and had cried out ‘Lalibela’ – meaning, literally, ‘the bees recognize his sovereignty’.78

  Thus the prince received his name. The prophecy that it expressed caused Harbay to fear for the safety of his throne to such an extent that he tried to have Lalibela murdered while he was still a babe in arms. This first attempt failed, but persecutions of one kind or another continued for several years, culminating in the administration of a deadly poison that plunged the young prince into a cataleptic sleep. Ethiopian legends said that the stupor lasted for three days, during which time Lalibela was transported by angels to the first, second and third Heavens. There he was addressed directly by the Almighty who told him to have no anxiety as to his life or future sovereignty. A Purpose had been mapped out for him, for which reason he had been anointed. After awaking from his trance he was to flee Ethiopia and seek refuge in Jerusalem. He could rest secure, however, that when the time was right he would return as king to Roha, his birthplace. Moreover it was his destiny that he would build a number of wonderful churches there, the like of which the world had never seen before. God then gave Lalibela detailed instructions as to the method of construction that was to be used, the form that each of the churches was to take, their locations and even their interior and exterior decorations.79

  Legend and history coincided at this point in a single well documented fact: Lalibela did indeed suffer a long period of exile in Jerusalem while his half-brother Harbay continued to occupy the throne of Ethiopia.80 This exile, I learned, began around the year 1160 – when Lalibela would have been about twenty years old – and ended in 1185 when he returned in triumph to his own country, deposed Harbay and proclaimed himself king.81

  From that date onwards there were reliable chronicles of his rule, which lasted until AD 1211.82 He made his capital at Roha, where he had been born and which was now renamed ‘Lalibela’ in his honour.83 There, perhaps in fulfilment of his legendary vision, he almost immediately set about building eleven spectacular monolithic churches – churches that were literally carved out of solid volcanic rock (I myself had visited those church
es in 1983 some weeks after my trip to Axum, and had found that they were still places of living worship).

  Neither did Lalibela forget his twenty-five-year sojourn in the Holy Land – many of the features of which he attempted to reproduce in Roha-Lalibela. For example, the river running through the town was renamed ‘Jordan’; one of the eleven churches – Beta Golgotha – was specifically designed to symbolize the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; and a nearby hill was called Debra Zeit (‘Mount of Olives’) so that it might represent the place where Christ was captured.84

  Not content with making his capital a kind of ‘New Jerusalem’, the Ethiopian king also sought, throughout his reign, to maintain close links with Jerusalem itself. There was, I discovered, nothing particularly new about this. Since the late fourth century AD clergy from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church had been permanently stationed in the Holy City.85 It had been a desire to increase and consolidate this presence that had led to Harbay’s request to Pope Alexander III to grant the concession of an altar and a chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Nothing had come of that – other than the Pope’s rather tentative letter sent in 1177 in reply to Harbay’s initial approach. A decade later, however, there had been two important developments: in 1185 Lalibela had seized the Ethiopian throne, and in 1187 Saladin had driven the Crusaders out of the Holy City and had forced Jerusalem’s Ethiopian community, together with other Eastern Christians, to flee to Cyprus.86

  The royal chronicles showed that Lalibela had been deeply disturbed by this turn of events and, in 1189, his envoys had managed to persuade Saladin to allow the Ethiopians to return and also to grant them, for the first time, a key site of their own – the Chapel of the Invention of the Cross, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.87 Subsequently, in relatively modern times, these privileges had again been lost; in consequence, I learned, Abyssinian pilgrims were now obliged to make their devotions on the roof of the chapel – where they had established a monastery.88 They also still possessed two other churches in Jerusalem as well as a substantial Patriarchate situated in the heart of the Old City within a few minutes’ walk of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

  Both in terms of foreign and domestic policy, and also in terms of architectural expression and spiritual development, Lalibela’s reign had represented the zenith of the Zagwe dynasty’s powers and achievements. After his death a steep decline set in. Finally, in AD 1270, his grandson Naakuto Laab was persuaded to abdicate in favour of Yekuno Amlak – a monarch claiming Solomonic descent.89 Thereafter, until Haile Selassie was deposed during the communist revolution of 1974, all but one of Ethiopia’s emperors had belonged to the royal line that traced its heritage back, through Menelik I, to King Solomon of Jerusalem.

  A pattern of coincidences

  Reviewing what I had learned about Lalibela’s illustrious reign, I realized that it fitted perfectly into the beguiling pattern of coincidences that I had already identified as being associated with the Crusades, with the Templars, and with the twelfth century:

  • At the very beginning of the twelfth century (or more properly in 1099, the last year of the eleventh century) Jerusalem was seized by the Crusaders.

  • In 1119 the nine founding knights of the Templar order – all French noblemen – arrived in Jerusalem and took up residence on the site of the original Temple of Solomon.

  • In 1128 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux won official church recognition for the Templars at the Synod of Troyes.

  • In 1134 work started on the north tower of Chartres cathedral, the first-ever example of Gothic architecture.

  • In 1145 the name ‘Prester John’ was first heard in Europe.

  • In 1160 Prince Lalibela, the future monarch of Ethiopia, arrived in Jerusalem as a political exile fleeing the persecutions of his half-brother Harbay (who then occupied the throne).

  • In 1165 a letter purporting to have been written by ‘Prester John’ and making a series of awe-inspiring claims about the size of his armies, his wealth and his power, had been circulated in Europe addressed to ‘various Christian kings’.

  • In 1177 Pope Alexander III issued a response to the above document but, significantly, made reference in it to another communication that he had received somewhat later – a request from ‘Prester John’ to be granted an altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It seemed that this request had been lodged by ‘the Prester’s’ emissaries who had spoken to the Pope’s personal physician Philip during a visit that the latter had made to Palestine. (The ‘Prester John’ who had asked for this concession could only have been Lalibela’s half-brother Harbay who, in 1177, was still on the throne of Ethiopia.)

  • In 1182 the Holy Grail made its first-ever appearance in literature (and, for that matter, in history) in an uncompleted narrative poem by Chrétien de Troyes.

  • In 1185 Prince Lalibela left Jerusalem and returned to Ethiopia where he successfully deposed Harbay and seized the throne. Almost immediately thereafter he began building a group of spectacular rock-hewn churches in his capital Roha – later renamed ‘Lalibela’ in his honour.

  • In 1187 Jerusalem fell to the Muslim forces of Sultan Saladin and the Crusaders were driven out, along with members of the Ethiopian community in the Holy City – who sought temporary refuge in Cyprus. (Some Templars also went to Cyprus – indeed, after the fall of Jerusalem, the knights bought the island which became, for a while, their headquarters.90)

  • In 1189 emissaries sent to Saladin by King Lalibela managed to persuade the Muslim general to allow the Ethiopians to return to Jerusalem and also to grant them a privilege that they had never enjoyed before, the same privilege that Harbay had sought from the Pope in 1177 – namely a chapel and altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

  • Between the years 1195 and 1200 Wolfram von Eschenbach began to write Parzival, which continued the earlier work done by Chrétien de Troyes and which, in the process, transformed the Grail into a Stone, incorporated many Ethiopic elements into the story, and specifically mentioned not only ‘Prester John’ but also the Templars.

  • At exactly the same time work started on the north porch of Chartres cathedral with its Ethiopic Queen of Sheba, its Grail (containing a Stone), and its representation of the Ark of the Covenant.

  The Templars, Gothic architecture, the Holy Grail and the notion that somewhere in the world there existed a powerful non-European Christian king called ‘Prester John’ had therefore all been the products of the twelfth century. And in that same century, just before Parzival was written and the north porch of Chartres cathedral built, a future Christian king of Ethiopia – Lalibela – had returned to his homeland to claim his throne after spending twenty-five years in Jerusalem.

  It seemed to me, from everything I had learned, that all these matters must have been intricately connected by some common factor that had remained hidden from history, perhaps because it had been deliberately concealed. Proof positive of a Templar quest for the lost Ark of the Covenant, first in Jerusalem and then later in Ethiopia, would provide that hidden but common factor – the missing link in the complex chain of inter-related events, ideas and personalities that I had identified. I knew, at least for the moment, that I had gone as far as I could with the part of my investigation that related to Jerusalem. But what about Ethiopia? Was there really any evidence at all that the Templars might have gone there to look for the Ark – and that they might subsequently have arranged for the results of their quest to be encoded by Wolfram in the arcane symbolism of his ‘Stone called the Gral’?

  ‘Those treacherous Templars …’

  The first breakthrough came when I received an English translation of the full text of the letter supposedly written by Prester John himself to various Christian kings in the year 1165. Unlike Pope Alexander III’s letter to Prester John, written in 1177 (which was a genuine document intended, as I now knew, for Lalibela’s half-brother Harbay) the 1165 letter was regarded with great suspicion by scholars. Its date was authe
ntic, but it was thought most unlikely that it could have been written by anyone with a real claim to the title ‘Prester John’ – and it was therefore regarded as an elaborate hoax.91

  As I read it I could understand why. If the writer was to be believed his ‘realms’ contained, amongst other things: ‘wild hares as big as sheep’; ‘birds called griffins who can easily carry an ox or a horse into their nest’; ‘horned men who have but one eye in front and three or four in the back’; ‘other men who have hoofed legs like horses’; ‘bowmen who from the waist up are men, but whose lower part is that of a horse’; the fountain of youth; a ‘sandy sea’ from which ‘every piece of debris … turns into precious stones’; ‘the tree of life’; ‘seven-headed dragons’ – and so on and so forth.92 Just about every mythical beast and object ever dreamed of, it seemed, was to be found in the land of Prester John. Where exactly this land was located, however, was nowhere specified in the letter – except in the loose reference to the ‘many Indias’ quoted in the previous chapter (a reference, as I now knew, that was more likely to have applied to Ethiopia than to the subcontinent). Moreover, scattered here and there amongst the fabulous creatures were other animals that did seem to belong to the real world: ‘elephants’ and ‘dromedaries’, for example, and also ‘unicorns’ with ‘a single horn in front’ which sounded very much like rhinoceroses – all the more so since, apparently, they were sometimes known to ‘kill lions’.93

  Such details made me wonder whether the writer of the letter might have been something more than a hoaxer – might, in fact, have had direct knowledge of Ethiopia (where, of course, camels, elephants, lions and rhinos were all to be found). My suspicion that this might have been so deepened when I noticed that mention was also made of ‘King Alexander of Macedonia’ in a context that linked him to ‘Gog and Magog’.94 This caught my eye because I remembered that Alexander, Gog and Magog had been connected in an almost identical manner in a very ancient Ethiopic manuscript known as the Lefafa Sedek, the ‘Bandlet of Righteousness’,95 which was supposedly unknown outside Abyssinia until the nineteenth century.