The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (25 page)

The Visigoths had accepted the Arian Christian faith that placed the one supreme God above all. This form of the faith had been
acceptable to the early Christian Church, as it had to the Jewish followers of Jesus. Later the Roman Church held the First Council of Nicaea (
A.D.
325) and adopted the position that Jesus was the Son of God and equal to God. They also adopted the concept of a Holy Trinity, which more closely resembled the Greek mystery religions—but without a female deity. The council declared that any divergent belief was a sin. The Frankish leader Clovis I saw his opportunity to remain with Rome. He declared himself a Christian and was baptized immediately. Immediately after conversion, he sought to conquer his wealthy neighbors in the south.

Besides the wealth of prosperous farms that was held by the Visigoths, Euric also had held the treasures plundered from Rome, specifically those of the Temple of Solomon. Euric adopted Toulouse as his base, and his treasure was hidden there.

After the reign of Euric, his son, Alaric II, took over. Alaric was no heir to his father’s and grandfather’s fighting ability and constantly yielded to Clovis in the north. The feeble Alaric was resigned to a Merovingian conquest of his region, since the Franks had the support of the Church and Rome. He continued to cede territory rather than fight and surrendered a fugitive Gallo-Roman king to Clovis. The appeasement strategy served only to build Clovis’s confidence, and in 507 the newly Christian Clovis himself killed Alaric, to become the king of France. Visigothic Spain and Frankish (Merovingian) Gaul had one last territory to battle over, the border lands between them known as Septimania; the struggle went on for years.
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The region became home to constant warfare, and religion was ostensibly the reason. Visigothic nobles tenaciously held on to their important centers, like Narbonne, and were backed by the Basques, who still control the mountainous region between the two countries.

The Crusade Against the Cathari

Not far from Aix is the town of Béziers.
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Just how many people from the east settled there will never be known, but Béziers became a center of what came to be regarded as the Arian heresy and the center of the sect
of Christian believers known as the Cathari, who denied the central authority of Rome. They were targeted by the Roman Church as part of the debate over Christ’s nature on Earth—was he man or god? Like the Jewish-Christians, the Cathari believed that Jesus on Earth was a man, a prophet. The scions of the Jesus bloodline, too, believed that he was a man. The Church, however, taught that Jesus was God even when he was on Earth—the question was not open to debate.

In 1209 forces of the Church massacred the entire population of the city. Seven thousand Cathari were killed in the church of the Madaleine. The leader of the Christian forces asked the prelate sent by the Pope just how he would know who the Cathari were. The church leader declared, “Kill them all; God will know his own.”
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From there they massacred Cathari and Christians alike in the surrounding towns and villages in a genocidal action that depopulated much of the wealthy Languedoc region of France.

The fortress of the Cathari was their stronghold at Montsegur.
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Guy de Levis owned the temple at Montsegur, which had been regarded as the “earthly image of their faith.”
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The Cathari held out here against a siege by the Church of Rome, which they regarded as the Antichrist that John had warned about in the Apocalypse. Rome after all, was love (amor) spelled backward and thus the antithesis of everything Jesus had taught. In the Book of Revelation, John had declared that he, too, was of the royal bloodline. “I am the root and the offspring of David.”
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The Church had every intention of stamping out the root and stock of David—such a bloodline had threatened Rome previously. The Church had become the survivor of the state of Rome. In the stamping out of the “sprouts” of the sacred bloodline, the line of David, were the descendants of the family of Jesus among the casualties? There is evidence that they were and possibly this family was, in fact, the target of such a crusade.

During this time the breakup of the Roman Empire left a constantly embattled Europe. There were no banks, Templar or otherwise, and often the wealth of barbaric kings and nobles was portable, in the form of gold and silver. Even the formidable castles and walled cities were no match for the onslaught of barbaric hordes. Wealth earned
and stolen plunder shared a need to be buried. Caves, grottoes, and man-made structures served as the predecessors of banks. Very little in the way of records exists to guide treasure hunters to caches that might have been left behind by nobles killed in battle, but there is evidence that such treasures
were
left behind for the lucky to stumble across hundreds of years later.

Chapter 9

T
HE
M
YSTERY OF
R
ENNES-LE-
C
HATEAU

S
ometime between 1885 and 1891, someone was very lucky and unearthed a treasure worth millions. A parish priest by the name of Bérenger Saunière had been posted to a very tiny mountain village at Rennes-le-Chateau. Saunière had been born in a nearby village in 1852 and had been ordained a priest in 1879. This village was his second assignment. It was not a good post for the learned young priest, who is described as having had a taste for the good life. Although larger than his first posting in the village of Clat, where there were twenty-three of the faithful in his congregation, Rennes-le-Chateau was far from Paris and at the time still accessible only by mule path.
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There was little “good life” to be had on his income, which was barely enough to support himself and a housekeeper. With a village of barely two hundred souls to look after, young Saunière had time on his hands. Whether it was from boredom or for another reason, Father Saunière decided to use his time to restore the village church, which was
in disrepair. The church had been built in 1059 over the ruins of a Visigothic church dedicated to Mary Magdalene that dated back six hundred years, to
A.D.
411.

The young priest chose to start his restoration with the altar. He removed the altar stone and the two pillars that supported it. To his amazement, one of the two pillars was hollow and contained three sealed tubes, each holding documents on parchment. The texts were in Latin—two were dated to 1244 and 1644, respectively. Two others were religious texts, but apparently coded. This was not the first time Saunière had come across odd documents that needed translation. Before the discovery of the parchments in the altar, a document that Saunière had found required the help of a local to translate; it supposedly contained property titles. The document was written in Latin, but it was a very old Latin, which the priest himself had not been trained to read. The notary he consulted was known to be well versed in the idioms and subtleties of the language of Virgil’s days. It was this document that may have started Saunière on his path to finding a treasure. It might also have been a document that the priest needed to keep secret.

The story is told that shortly after a notary, from nearby Quillan, translated documents for Father Saunière, the two went on an outing, a hike in the rocky mountainside with some village children. Saunière and the notary from Quillan preceded the children through a steep, brush-covered path, where there was an accident. Father Saunière was hurt, and the notary was killed. A police inquest concluded that the death was indeed an accident, as Saunière claimed. Few priests would have been doubted, but it would not be the last strange death in the life of Saunière.
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When Saunière found the documents concealed in the hollow columns of the altar, he contacted the bishop of Carcassonne, Monseigneur Felix-Arsene Billard. His bishop sent him to Paris and to the abbé Bieil, the director of Saint Sulpice.
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In Paris he also made a point of seeking out three paintings that held significance.

One of the paintings,
Les Bergers d’Arcadie
(The Shepherds of Arcadia)
,
was by Nicolas Poussin; it depicted three shepherds looking at a tomb and pointing. The inscription read “Et in Arcadia Ego.” The tomb in Poussin’s painting and a certain tomb near Rennes-le-Chateau were one
and the same. The message itself translates as “And in Arcadia, I am.” The significance of this message remains uncertain, but it and others found in the texts of the parchments held great significance to Saunière. Upon his return, the priest visited the local cemetery and removed the inscription. The only reason we know today just what was inscribed on the stone is that the town had kept a record of the gravestone.

Besides the three paintings, it is unknown what exactly Saunière discovered in Paris; there is no question, however, that the paintings led to something of great value. From a parish priest with an income of thirty dollars annually, he became a millionaire. The money changed his lifestyle and Rennes-le-Chateau forever, and according to some the religious-historical significance of his find (genealogies preserving the blood line of Jesus Christ) has the power to change the world. He suddenly went from being an impoverished parish priest to a philanthropist who spent millions on public works for his village. He built roads where before there were only dirt paths. He girded his own village with ramparts, although he was not expecting a siege. Or was he? He modernized the water supply for the ancient village. He founded a zoological garden, restored the church, built himself a library, and put up a tower dedicated to Mary Magdalene. In total it is estimated that he spent the equivalent of five to twenty million in today’s dollars. He also began entertaining important guests from all over Europe, from royalty to artists. What attracted such personages as the Hapsburgs and opera singers to Rennesle-Chateau, we can only guess.

The documents Saunière found were genealogies that traced the lines of certain people backed to Visigothic-Merovingian times, and further still. They may even contain the bloodline of David extending to Jesus and from Jesus through descendants living in France. Whatever was translated by the unfortunate notary led Saunière to the parchments in the altar, which in turn brought him to the cemetery of the tiny village and ultimately to the tomb that was the subject of Poussin’s painting—the tomb of one Marie de Negri D’Ables, who died on January seventeenth in the year 1781. This tomb of Marie de Negri D’Ables revealed the message “Et in Arcadia Ego,” which had been inscribed by the abbé Bigou, a previous curé of Rennes-le-Chateau, who also composed the
coded parchments found in the church.
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One of these parchments provided the message “To Dagobert II and Sion belong this treasure, and it is death.” Sion, of course, was Zion, or Israel. Dagobert II was one of the last heirs to the Merovingian French throne, and Marie had descended from the royal line.

Marie was the widow of Francis of Hautpoul, the lord of Rennes and Blanchefort. She had three surviving daughters; her son had died young. If she was the last of an unbroken line, she found herself in a predicament, being without a surviving male heir to whom she could pass the treasure. Her relationship with her three daughters was described as “acrid,” and in them she placed no confidence.
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And she needed someone in whom to confide. This was one hundred years before Saunière would arrive in the village. His predecessor was the abbé Bigou.

To the abbé Bigou the secret genealogy of Marie and her family tree was passed. On Marie’s death her secret was safe. If the family held a treasure, it was not one that she apparently wished to use. Her daughters continued to live in obscurity and lost the family estate to foreclosure. If Marie held a secret or a treasure, Bigou left only clues. The treasure, said the message, belonged to Dagobert. This was the message that fell into the hands of Father Saunière. Many of these documents and messages found by Saunière are confusing. Some were passages from the Bible, but the words ran together, and words not found in the Bible had been added. Certainly much was in code. One message was so complete in its coding that a computer used by the military could not decipher it; this one may have been deciphered by Saunière. Whatever its meaning, it appears that Father Saunière found the key. For us, he, too, left only clues, and some of these are visible in his bizarre restoration of the church.
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