The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (7 page)

Matters are further complicated by the fact that some monks gave more than one statement in the course of the
trial, changing their stories from one inquiry to another for reasons that we can sometimes only guess at (torture, promised rewards, the desire to avenge some personal wrong, etc). A classic case is that of
Brother Raoul de Gisy, preceptor of the command of Latigny and charged with exacting the king’s taxes in the county of Champagne: this man went from a red-hot first account of events, in which he claimed to have seen the
idol no less than seven times and that it was the image of a devil, to a wholly different one where he had seen it only once, by chance, and had no idea what it really was. The explanation lies in the fact that
Raoul de Gisy made his first confession on 9 November 1307 under pressure by Guillaume de
Nogaret and the Inquisitor of France; an interrogation carried out immediately after the wave of illegal arrests, when the King needed most serious evidence against the Order, and fast, to justify before the Pope his violation of the rights of the Church; the second was released on 15 January 1312 in an inquiry carried out by a commission of bishops, when the Pope had already taken control of the
trial and interrogations took place with greater guarantees.
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Historians may find themselves as disconcerted as archaeologists would when, on opening the site of an ancient garbage pit, they meet with thousands of tiny pieces of pottery, different in make, material and colour, each of which will have to be carefully identified and re-made. In spite of the difference between the disciplines, there is only one way to make order out of chaos and reach a sufficiently valid understanding: one has to work with minute patience, bringing all fragments of the same type together and at the same time discarding extraneous material that does not help and that has found its way into the heap by chance.

Some certainties may be reached as soon as we start reading with care the circumstances in which individual question sessions with the Templars took place, and they greatly help to understand many things about the
trial. We know, for instance, that in some cases Templars were questioned once; but the inquisitors were not being satisfied with their statements. Instead of taking the testimonies as they were, they had the brothers tortured, then gave them time to think it over, and finally staged a second question session: this time their confessions, full of detail that their tormentors found satisfactory, were accepted and taken down as evidence. We also know that the
trial went through several phases, and that these phases were widely different both in the methods used by questioners, and in their good faith. Therefore the statements sought by the questioners also changed widely according to date and place; he who asks the question is very able to influence the answer.
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The issue of the
idol is one of the most complex, since it was a charge that lent itself more than any other to becoming coloured by fantasy, in part because of the violence in questioning the Templars, and in part because of the power of psychological suggestion – a mighty power and never to be underestimated – that rose everywhere in the dark climate of the scandal. Once we get over the first, disconcerting impact, it becomes clear that behind all the descriptions of the
idol there are only five kinds of object that appear over and over again, if maybe with varying details. Three of these were cult objects, that is things basically not different from many others that mediaeval faithful saw every day in their churches: a reliquary-sculpture showing head, neck, upper chest and shoulders, a painting on wood, and finally the portrait of a man with a rather strange and ill-defined frame. No doubt, if such portraits were worshipped in secret, that made it the more urgent for investigators to know who was the man they represented, but the presence alone of such objects in Templar churches was not enough to support a charge of heresy. On the other hand, the other two objects lent themselves to it wonderfully, for they were things that could make an enormous impression in the mind of mediaeval men: had the prosecution only been able to find any such thing in a Templar command and take it to the Pope, that might have been enough to get a swift condemnation of the entire Order. The first of these supposed “
idols” that the questioners tried to make the captive monks describe was a portrait of Mohammed, presented as evidence that the Templars had betrayed the Christian faith and gone secretly over to Islam. The second was some kind of monstrous or even devilish image, useful to prove that the Templars had been practising sorcery.

Portraits of Islam

The identification of the
idol with a portrait sacred to Islam is found in six testimonies, but it cannot be called certain or identical in all cases.
Brother Sergeant Guillaume Collier from Buis-les-Baronnies said explicitly that the brothers called the strange head
Magometum
, while two monks questioned in Florence and in Clermont said they had seen an
idol called, respectively,
Maguineth
and
Mandaguorra
; in the inquiry that took place in
Carcassonne, the monks Gaucerand de Montpézat and Raymond Rubei stated that it was made
in figura baffometi
, and the latter specified that he was addressed by an Arabic word,
Yalla
.
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In the inquest carried out in Tuscia, near Rome, the sergeant
Gualtiero di Giovanni from Naples said that during his ceremony of admission to the Temple there had been a real theological discussion to deny the dogmas of
Christianity, and the
idol, a figure of Allah, was at the centre of the debate: he said that brother Alberto made him deny Christ and told him that he should not believe in him. Brother Gualtiero then asked: “And in whom should I believe then?” The same brother Alberto answered: “In that great and single God that the
Saracens worship”.

He then added that it was wrong to believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, because they amounted to no less than three different gods, and he ended by stating that the Grand Master of the Temple and the preceptors in charge of a province had an image which represented that same God, worshipped him as creator, and exhibited his portrait in general chapters and in the most important assemblies. This testimony may perhaps be connected with that of Pierre Segron, who was told by the preceptor that he should not believe in Jesus Christ, but only in the Almighty Father: this confession, however, contains no reference to Islam.
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On the name of this supposed portrait, there is one clear testimony that calls it
Magometum
, a form very close to the genuine pronunciation; according to two brothers in Carcassonne it was called
baffometum
, a form that comes from the first but is distorted on account of the passage from Arabic to French. It is this form that has given rise to the fanciful etymologies once proposed by
Hammer-Purgstall and accepted today only by readers of fantasy fiction. The other two variants,
Maguineth
and
Mandaguorra
, are also deformations of the original word, while the strange invocation to the
idol supplied by another Templar,
Yalla
, seeks to replicate the Arabic form
Allah
with a strong initial; aspirations which the notary who had to write the minutes in Latin rendered with the letter Y. But is it conceivable that the Templars, maybe even a small part of them, had become Muslims? Their strange secret admission-ritual practised after the licit ceremony did indeed have a direct relationship with the Muslim world: in the East it was known that
Saracens forced Christian prisoners to deny Jesus Christ and to spit on the Cross, on pain of death if they refused. This is described in the chronicle of the Franciscan Fidenzio da
Padova, and the ritual of obedience invented by the Templars to test their recruits repeated these gestures in a kind of theatrical performance. The King of France’s lawyers had found out about it after years of secret investigations: to manage to confirm that the Templars had gone over to Islam
en masse
would have been vitally important to get the condemnation they were seeking, even better if they could have proved that the mysterious
idols on which the King had gathered a few scraps of information was in fact Mohammed.

Two facts prove that this charge was utterly false: incoherent elements, incompatible with each other, yet liable to be brought together somehow by a 14th century European mind. To begin with, it is well known that the Islamic religion utterly forbids images of the Prophet, and all images of Mohammed are actually figures of his body with his face hidden by holy fire. The “
idol” ascribed to the Templars, however, was clearly the portrait of a normal human being with a bearded face; that cannot in any way be considered an image of Mohammed. The same is true of the testimony of that Templar who claimed the
idol was an image of Allah: the Koran forbids utterly any representation of God whatever, for this would be
idolatry, and Islamic civilisation has always been most careful to respect this rule. The second feature is even more definite: according to one witness, the portrait of this supposed
Machomet
had horns!
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That proves beyond reasonable doubt that the tale has no relationship whatever with real Islam; it is the fruit of tortures carried out by inquisitors and goes exactly where the torturers wanted their witness to go, for their own reasons. No Christian who had anything actually to do with any Muslim group could ever have imagined them worshipping the Devil; in spite of all the strong religious differences, Muslims were highly devout and had a few essential points of faith in common with Christians – in particular, a single Creator God, who is a benevolent and just Father. Unarguable historical evidence tells us that a certain amount of inter-religious debate went on in Jerusalem, and it is at any rate well known that St.
Francis of Assisi was received by the Sultan of Egypt and took part in a theological debate with him. In the Holy Land, Muslims were essentially political opponents, people who governed Jerusalem and Syria-Palestine alongside Christians; the whole history of the kingdom of Jerusalem is full of alliances between Christian rulers and various local emirs, alliances based on common interests and setting religious differences aside.
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In a country such as France, where no Muslim communities existed among the population, the common people had the most vague and bizarre ideas on their religious usages: the largely illiterate commoners, used to the simplistic idea that one went to the Holy Land to kill enemies of the faith, could easily be led to believe that those enemies of the faith had something dark and devilish about them. It is probably not a chance occurrence that this kind of rumour found no fertile ground either in Spain or in Cyprus, where contacts with Muslims were frequent and Christians had a much clearer view of them. Not that it made any difference to
Nogaret whether or not the brothers worshipped Mohammed or even the Devil, so long as they could be charged with an unforgivable crime that struck deep into the imagination of the popular masses.

The shadow of Ridefort

In the current state of research, I think that the Templars who said that the
idol was a portrait of
Mahomet
may have seen a vaguely human image, but strange or at least unlike those of the saints seen everywhere in the churches. Pressed by torture, and having no understanding whatever of the identity of the man represented, they were forced to make statements of that kind. Without a doubt it was the portrait of a man; but since nobody could understand who it was, then it must inevitably be something illicit. The fact is that there was no power in the mediaeval world to interpret freely a work of art, because all images were rigidly controlled, and therefore every personage could be recognised on sight. Mediaeval sacred art has fixed iconographic forms, because its purpose is not just to guide but to educate souls; already Pope
Gregory I the Great (590-604) had strongly recommended to respect this precept: the faithful were largely illiterate and did not have the ability to understand too elaborate a set of concepts, so the figures that illustrated sacred history on the walls of churches were a great treasure-store for the people, forming the doctrine of the common person.
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There was an ancient, consolidated tradition, known to everyone and guiding them: St. Peter must always carry a large key in his hand, as the symbol of his power, St. Anthony the Abbot had to wear his monk’s hood and have a meek little pig sitting by his feet, so that the faithful could recognise them immediately. Artists had to follow fixed schemes; their interpretative liberty was limited to secondary details, and at any rate their work was evaluated by the relevant Church authorities. A representation of holy things that did not conform to Church tradition appeared suspicious and would be condemned, for it could create confusion in those who did not have enough culture to defend them from error. Had the Templar
idol been a traditional image of any saint, the monks would have recognised him; instead, everyone who saw this portrait agreed that they could not tell who it was, that there were no elements to help identify him. Showings often took place at night: in the dark church, shaken by the irregular light of candles, the atmosphere became that of a mysterious and grim cult. Required to worship the portrait of someone they did not recognise, and conscious that it was a secret cult, the monks were awestruck and experienced these liturgies as terrible things.

The King of France’s agents took advantage of this fact and tied it to the charge that the Templars had gone over to Islam thanks to an easy (and unhistorical) syllogism: the Order of the Temple is friendly to Muslims, in its ceremonies a man of unknown identity is worshipped; therefore that mysterious man must be the prophet of Islam, that is Mahomet. The accusation obviously had no roots in reality, since Islamic religion forbids the portraiture of Mohammed, and therefore even if many Templars had indeed gone over to Islam, this cult described in the
trial would have been utterly impossible. But
Nogaret was not concerned for the charge to be true, so long as it could be believed by that western world which was being asked to condemn the Order. The King’s grand strategist had dusted off the shelf a rumour already over 100 years old, which had been popular for a while and had momentarily stained the Order’s good name. When, in 1187,
Saladin had won his memorable triumph at the Horns of
Hattin, and taken back Jerusalem for Islam, he had always behaved most generously to the local Christians, granting freedom not only to the rich who could pay their ransoms, but also to the poor, for the mere love of God; it was only to the Templars and
Hospitallers, the true thorns in his military side, he had shown no mercy whatsoever, and had had them beheaded. In that context, the Templar Grand Master Gérard de
Ridefort, captured by the enemy, had been seen to come back unhurt to his people when everyone already believed him dead. As everyone knew how the Sultan saw the Templars, this had immediately struck everyone as most suspicious. Besides,
Ridefort was well known as an adventurer, an opportunist, a traitor of friends, who had risen in Templar ranks without gaining anything like a good reputation on his way up. His reputation grew even worse when it became known that he had bartered his freedom with the surrender of Templar fortresses. In a word, he had betrayed the Order in the vilest of manners.
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The conditions agreed at the time between
Ridefort and the Sultan had shocked Christian society so much that the echo of the scandal had been recorded in the Chronicle of St. Denis; besides, Christian society was appalled at the disaster just suffered, the military orders were being singled out by everyone as the main culprits in the failure, and a scapegoat hunt seemed inevitable. The cowardly, arrogant, unworthy
Ridefort seemed born for the role.