The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (8 page)

This was the source that Guillaume de
Nogaret pulled out of the shelves to charge the Templars of having gone over to Islam. A few similar rumours had spread again towards the end of the 13th century, when certain diplomatic agreements made by Christian leaders in the Holy Land with the Muslim enemy had not been understood in the West and had caused intense polemics. During the
trial, Guillaume de
Nogaret suddenly turned up and resurrected the whole affair, to which Jacques de
Molay had to give an answer:

In the chronicles kept at the abbey of Saint-Denis, it was written that in the time of
Saladin, sultan of Babylon, the Templar Grand Master of the time and the other heads of the order had paid homage to
Saladin. Saladin in turn, having heard of the grave adversities being suffered by the Templars, said in public that they were meeting all that trouble because they had fallen into the vice of Sodom and prevaricated their faith and their laws. The Grand Master [Jacques de
Molay] was astonished at those words, and he answered that he had never heard anything of the kind.

On the other hand, he knew that once upon a time,
Guillaume de Beaujeu, the master of the Temple, used to murmur against the Grand Master, that he had served the Sultan and kept him sweet.

In the end, though, both he and the others were happy with that policy, because they understood that the Grand Master had had no choice. In those days, the Templar Order held several towns and fortresses, which he named, at the border of the Sultan’s land, which could not have been defended by the Christians had the King of England not sent supplies.
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In the Holy Land, diplomacy was as much a weapon of war as weapons themselves, perhaps even more: the first decades of the Crusader kingdom had enjoyed comparative quiet just because the Muslim powers abutting on it often preferred to make alliances with the Christians and remain autonomous than fall under the sway of a much bigger Islamic power. The work of Grand Master
Beaujeu, who later died heroically at Saracen hands while he protected the flight of civilians by the sea, had been dictated by political reasons, and his full good faith had been shown by the news of that odd alliance had certainly led the ill-disposed to suspect that the Templars were inept because in reality they had no intention of attacking Islam because it had covertly gained their sympathies. The context and dynamics of the
trial were to turn this scrap of gossip into a black accusation.
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Many faces

The Templars who described the
idol as though it were a portrait of the Devil were full of surreal detail: the monster has many faces, he is associated with a black cat who always appears mysteriously, he is worshipped during a witches’ Sabbath, he is even said to answer the monk who prays to him and promises hefty material advantages. Any historian would be immediately tempted to reject such descriptions, taking them for nothing but the sorry fruit of torture; however, it is better to avoid quick judgments, because experience shows that even the most absurd statements may sometimes conceal grains of truth in their depths, real facts that have to be brought to light by cleaning them from the many dark details added on by torture, by psychological violence, and by the awful suggestions raised by the atmosphere of the
trial.

We know for instance that mediaeval Christian tradition used to represent the dogma of the Trinity by means of three separate but identical figures, or even by one body with three faces. It was the
vultus trifrons
, an arrangement thought up in the 1200s to somehow give a visual account of the complex concept of a single God in three Persons. During the
Council of Trent (1545-1563) many features of popular religion that had previously been accepted by everyone were weighed and discussed, and among them the three-faced head: it was seen that this image was too much like certain ancient representations of pagan gods, such as the Roman Diana, whom Virgil calls in the
Aeneid
(IV, 511) “Virgin with three faces”, or the Greek Hekate, goddess of the lower world, associated with the moon and represented with three faces to allude to its three phases – crescent, full, decreasing. Hekate was the queen of the otherworld, and in some pagan magical texts she was called upon by magicians and sorcerers; in the Roman imagination and in that of early Christianity she was seen as an image of the Devil, even though the divinity did not originally have anything evil about her, and in the tradition of mediaeval art three-headed demonic monsters can sometimes be found (as for instance in the front of the church of St. Peter in Tuscania). In 1628, Pope
Urbanus VIII forbade any further representation of the Trinity under that pagan-originated and, all things considered, monstrous scheme, and in 1745
Benedict XIV ordered that the three Persons should be only represented according to images found in Holy Scripture: the Father as a venerable elder, the “Ancient of Days” of the book of the prophet Daniel; the Son as a young man, and the Spirit in the shape of a dove. We know that the Order of the Temple was originally dedicated to the
Holy Trinity, and the text approved in Troyes the founder and his followers are called, exactly, Knights of the
Holy Trinity; we cannot in the least exclude that the churches of the Order included some sculptures of this very peculiar kind, little used in Gothic art but absolutely licit, used as late as the Renaissance in Donatello’s decorations of the tabernacle of St. Thomas the Apostle in Orsanmichele, Florence.
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A magnificent manuscript from the Vatican Library, painted in Naples by Matteo Planisio in 1362, features a cycle of miniatures representing the creation of the world: God is represented as the Three Persons of the Trinity, that is a venerable elder with a two-faced head, one as an old man (the Father) and the other as a beardless teenaged boy (the Son), while the dove that represents the Holy Spirit rests on his shoulder.
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If we exclude the dove, who is not equally visible in all the miniatures, one must admit that the Creator appears as a strange being with one head and two faces: the smooth-featured boy’s face, with no facial hair, does in effect seem like a woman’s. Mediaeval art does from time to time come up with this kind of invention, it does not find it so important to represent things realistically so much as to bring out symbolic and spiritual meanings. Certainly such images must have seemed monstrous to anyone who saw them without adequate preparation.

It’s hard to tell what these simulacra described by some questioned Templars, with two, three or even four faces, ever stood for. Some testimonies certainly spoke of real things, sacred goods used for liturgy and cult, while others are no more than the deformed birth of terror and violence. For this purpose it can be very useful to consider the geographical areas where the various questionings took place. The
trial took place practically all over Christendom, with inquiries in France, England, Scotland, Italy, Germany, the Spanish peninsula and Cyprus. And yet all the scary and filthy testimonies concentrate in France, especially in the historical region of Midi, which was the headquarters of the dreaded Inquisition. From this region comes an unfortunately incomplete document, which can only be called “
Languedoc Enquiry” since it lacks any reference to place and date of questioning. However, many clues suggest that the well-known inquisitor
Bernard Gui was involved at least in the information-gathering stage. This document is an absolute mine of information about the factors that affected the
trial, and does much to explain why scholars such as Nicolai,
Hammer-Purgstall and many more could get such a grim picture of the ceremonies that took place in the Temple.
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Right from the first affidavit to survive without damage from the
Languedoc enquiry, the interrogated monk, a sergeant called
Guillaume Collier from Buis-le-Baronnies (Drôme), told that he was admitted with a normal ceremony, but that immediately after the preceptor refuted some fundamental dogmas of
Christianity, such as the divinity of Jesus and the Virgin Birth; then he opened a secret window in a part of the church, where a silver
idol with no less than three faces was kept. He was told that that
idol represented a mighty patron of the Order who could get them any kind of grace from Heaven. Then suddenly he saw a mysterious red cat appear near the
idol; immediately the preceptor and all those present doffed their caps and paid homage to the
idol, whose name was Mahomet (
Magometum
).
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This is a genuine cliché that forms a pattern for the path of confession and is repeated from affidavit to affidavit; however, as each successive Templar speaks, the pattern grows more elaborate and more gross, as in a kind of ghastly crescendo. According to the next monk to be questioned, another sergeant called Ponce de Alundo from Montélimar (again in the Drôme), the
idol even has horns; indeed, it is no longer a simple image, but a real demon who even lives and speaks – the candidate talks with him as one would with a real person, asks him for material favours and is promised its support. This time the mysterious cat who appears by the
idol is black, so more similar to the animal whom contemporary imagination placed with witches; by the preceptor’s order, the devil-cat is to be adored and kissed on its anus. As we go on reading other testimonies, we find that the obscene detail of the kiss of the cat is a constant, and that the animal also seems to be nearly always black. However, two theatrical details appear: the magical feline vanishes miraculously as soon as he has received the new monk’s homage, and someone concludes that it must in effect be the Devil in the shape of a cat.
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The records then bring in a further sensational development: a knight by the name of Geoffroy de
Pierrevert, preceptor of the mansion of Rué in the department of Var, said that he had been present at an admission ceremony during which, apart from an
idol with no less than four faces and a devil-cat, the demonic presence was also manifested with the apparition of some women in black mantles, who materialised in the room even though all the doors had been closed and barred. According to him, the strange women had no carnal relations with the monks present at the ceremony. This surely disappointed greatly the inquisitors but they soon got their own back when during another session, Garnier de
Luglet, from the diocese of Langres, said the witches who had appeared had indeed been allowed to corrupt the monks, vanishing immediately after they had dragged them along into deadly sin.
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In short, the questions were built according to a scheme that tended to dig through successive layers: first the accused was questioned about the
idol’s presence, then the questioner asked whether a cat was also present, and if the answer was not positive, they proceeded to investigate the animal’s role in the ceremony and its real nature. With those who proved ready to give a positive answer in this crescendo, the questioning moved further, asking first about the apparition of witches, then hammering on the question about celebrating a demonic orgy. The procedures employed in
Languedoc had unique features in the context of the broader
trial. I think that it is beyond comparison that the area where the evidence is most polluted by the conscious intervention of the inquisitors: here the charges against the monks are much more serious than those conceived by
Philip the Fair in his order of arrest, which was intended to get the Templars condemned as fast as possible. The very minutes of the investigation say it in so many words: witnesses would be first properly prepared with suitable tortures, then they were left several days to reflect (or recover at least enough to be able to speak), and finally were questioned again.

The way such
trials were managed speaks volumes: during the inquest held in Poitiers from 28 June to 2 July, 1308,
Clemens V interrogated, with the help of his assistant Cardinals, 72 Templars within five days;
Philip the Fair himself and the Inquisitor of France Guillaume de Paris, immediately after the arrests, had questioned no less than 138 brothers captured in the Temple of Paris in barely a month, from 19 October to 24 November, 1307. The investigators who managed the
Languedoc inquiry, however, took an amazing two months to question barely 25 persons; the “preparation” of witnesses must have been horrendous.
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A letter written by the Inquisitor of France Guillaume de Paris to
Bernard Gui, the most famous Inquisitor of the 1300s, entrusts him with some operations in the
trial against the Templars, and rouses a legitimate suspicion: the
Languedoc inquiry, Languedoc being
Bernard Gui’s headquarters, did not follow the scheme of Guillaume de
Nogaret, but rather another drawn up by the dreadful Inquisitor, who pursued charges of sorcery and devil-raising.
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In the indictment written in Paris by the royal lawyers, the
idol is in fact quite a marginal issue and there is no trace whatever of devils; whereas, in the confession extracted from Templars in
Languedoc, the strange
idol is one and the same with the Devil in the shape of a cat and with witches, and the description of these sinister rituals takes up a great deal of the text. To the contrary, in the north of France, the charge of sodomy is placed very much to the forefront, as though it alone were enough to blast the Order’s reputation beyond remedy, and a boy is found who is ready to confess that Jacques de
Molay (who was well beyond 60) had even abused him no less than three times in a single night.
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In the south, on the other hand, sodomy went altogether unmentioned: maybe the ordinary mentality was more tolerant, or else it was simply decided to go for something much more “explosive”. In a way, the
idol had indeed many faces: faces different from each other, indeed sometimes incompatible, which the prosecutors hid or showed according to what the tastes and fears of the public were.