The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (9 page)

II

Behold the man!

A peculiar sacredness

Once we have cleared the field of all the confusion and ascertained the origin of the charges of Islamism and black magic, the other descriptions of the Templars’
idol seem suddenly very concrete; it’s simply a human portrait, made of diverse materials and representing an unknown man. It’s in this group of realistic observations, descriptions of simple objects of sacred art, that we find the most interesting data. The idol is a simple object, although for some reason the Templars seem to see it as incomparably valuable. That it was a portrait came out immediately, during the very first interrogations that followed the arrests of October 1307; but the sensationalism with which the Templars’ arrest had been advertised confused everyone’s ideas. People had started yelling about heresy and sorcery, and now they saw them everywhere.

Sergeant Rayner de
Larchent saw it twelve times during twelve separate general chapters, and the last was the one held in Paris the Tuesday after the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, the July before the arrest. As he described it, it was a bearded head that the monks kissed, calling it their “saviour”; he did not know where it was placed or who kept it, but he guessed that it was the Grand Master or the officer who oversaw the general chapter. It was also seen in Paris by brothers Gautier de
Liencourt, Jean de
La Tour, Jean le Duc, Guillaume
d’Erreblay,
Raoul de Gisy and Jean de Le Puy. The ceremonial display was presided over by the Grand Master, or more often the Visitor of the West, Hugues de
Pérraud, who was the second in the Templar hierarchy and became the most powerful templar in Europe when the Grand Master happened to be in the East.
[1]
When questioned, Hugues de
Pérraud admitted the existence of this
idol and its cult, but said precious little to help us in our modern historical research.

Of the head we just mentioned, he said under oath that he saw, held and touched it near Montpellier during a chapter. Both he and the other brothers worshipped it: he, however, only pretended adoration, acting with the mouth but not with the heart, and could not say who else offered adoration from the heart. Asked where the
idol was, he said that he left it with brother
Pierre Allemandin, who was preceptor of the mansion of Montpellier: but he could not say whether the King’s agents would find it. He said that this head had four feet, two in front on the side of the face, and two behind.
[2]

The testimony does not specify what kind of simulacrum this was. However, it states that it had four feet, which points at a three-dimensional object held up by supports.

At the end of his and the Roman Curia’s inquest in the summer of 1308, the Pope removed the investigations from the inquisitors and decreed that they were to be handed over in each territory to special commissions formed by the local bishops. These were not dependent on the King of France and did not have to follow the plans of his legal strategists; the Pope only tasked them with shedding light on that thorny affair. Some of these bishops may not have loved the Templars for personal reasons; it is well known that there was widespread envy towards this rich and powerful religious order with its many privileges: but they had no direct interest in persecuting as was the case with the King and with Guillaume de
Nogaret’s group. It’s hardly surprising that it is during the investigations carried out by diocesan bishops many of the accusations thrown in the previous period started to totter, while others suddenly took a more rational and credible aspect. The diocesan bishops swiftly came to understand that the Templars’ notorious
idol-head was in fact a reliquary, an upper bust sculpture containing the remains of some saint, a very widespread class of object in mediaeval sacred art: this comes out clearly as soon as the management of interrogations was handed over to the Pope, and in the very inquiry held in Poitiers in June 1308,
Clemens V was able to come to the conclusion himself. In his presence, the sergeant brother Étienne de
Troyes said:

Concerning the head, he said that it was the Order’s custom to celebrate each year a general chapter on the day of the Apostles Peter and Paul, and one of those was held in Paris the year he was admitted into the Order. He took part in the Chapter all the three days it lasted: they would begin in the first watch of the night and went on until the first hour of day. During the first night of the chapter they carried a head: it was borne by a priest, who was preceded as he moved forth by two brothers who held large torches and burning candles in silver candelabra. The priest laid they head over the altar, on two pillows and a silken carpet. The witness thought it was a head of human flesh, from the top of the skull to the knot of the epiglottis; it had white hair, and nothing covered it. The face also was of human flesh, and seemed to him very livid and discoloured, with a beard of mixed white and dark hair, similar to the beard that Templars wear. Then the Order’s Visitor said: “Let us worship him and pay him homage, for it is he who made us and it is he who can dismiss us”. They all approached it with the highest reverence and paid it homage and worshipped that head. He heard someone say that that skull had belonged to the first Master of the Order, brother Hugues de
Payns: from the Adam’s apple to its shoulder blades, it was covered in gold and silver and studded with precious stones.
[3]

The same object, in all likelihood a reliquary of the founder, Hugues de
Payns, was also seen in the Temple of Paris by brother
Bartholomé Bocher of the Chartres diocese, who joined the order in 1270; according to him, the reliquary did not stay in that place, but was only carried there during special occasions, and was then taken off and put away elsewhere:

The Templar who welcomed him into the order showed him a certain head that someone had placed on the altar of that little chapel by the sanctuary and the vases with the relics; he was told that when he was in difficulties, he should call on the help of that head. Asked how that head was made, he answered that it looked like the head of a Templar, with the head cover and a hoary and long beard; but he could not tell whether it was made of metal, wood, bone or human flesh, and his preceptor did not explain whose head it was. He had never seen it before nor did he see it afterwards, although he must have been in that chapel at least a hundred times.
[4]

There was a certain suggestive power about this tale, told in the Pope’s presence, as he had for the first time the opportunity to personally listen to the Templars after nearly a year of hearing accusations and dreadful rumours. The scene of that mysterious cult, emerging from the dark in the shaky light of candles, indubitably could not make a positive impression on him. But in and of itself, the witness was not very serious. The Templars paid special cult to their founder Hugues de
Payns, revering him as a great saint during certain nocturnal liturgies, and exposed his head, whether mummified or naturally preserved, within a large and precious reliquary. Hugues de
Payns had never been officially canonized, and to the Church of Rome he remained simply a
conversus
who had chosen to serve God in the same way as countless other unknown priests and monks. Hugues de
Payns had never been raised to the honour of altars, and
Clemens V, as a specialist in canon law, could not look kindly on such solemn veneration; but in the Middle Ages people used to regard some people as saints purely for their simple lifestyle, even during their lifetimes. As soon as they died, their bodies and the objects they had owned immediately became precious relics, people started coming to pray on their graves, asking for miracles and intercessions with God, without waiting for the Church to complete its long, prudent bureaucratic process. Saints were made by popular acclamation. When the rumour spread through Assisi that
Francis was dying in the Porziuncola, the people started praying, waiting impatiently to be finally allowed to see and worship the stigmata on his body: this is a famous and peculiar case, but many more could be mentioned.
[5]

The idea that contact with the body of saints had beneficent effects was certainly no mediaeval innovation. It belonged to the most ancient Christian tradition: the
Book of Acts
tells that people approached Paul as he was preaching, and the faithful would touch his clothes with silken handkerchiefs, because they were certain that they were making relics for themselves. The Apostle’s divine charisma passed from his body to clothes and kerchiefs.
[6]
It might be that their worship of their founder Hugues de
Payns, whom they held to be a holy man, may have led
Clemens V to admonish them to reduce the cult to more sober proportions; but it was very, very far from evidence of heresy. As a matter of fact, in the Cyprus interrogations, carried out by a commission of local prelates a thousand miles from
Philip the Fair and his pressure, the Templars absolutely denied any charge to do with deviant behaviours or ideas where religion was concerned. Furthermore, many secular nobles, priests, and religious from other orders offered to testify, declaring that the Templars observed the cult with exemplary devotion. It seems that they practised very peculiar and beautiful liturgies of adoration of the Cross during Good Friday, in which others who were not Order members would also take part. A priest said that he would celebrate Mass in Temple churches, and had from time to time celebrated jointly with Order chaplains: the formulas of consecration of the Host were spoken exactly as required. A Dominican who often carried out religious service with the Templars said that he had heard many of them in Confession, both in Cyprus and in France, and none of them had heretical attitudes on their conscience.
[7]

The charge of
idolatry and disbelief in the Eucharist soon proved utterly hollow. And yet Guillaume de
Nogaret and his assistants had gone about building it just as they had done with the other charges: the method of half truths. They had started from a core of actual facts, a breadcrumb of truth suitably amplified and distorted.

Intuitions

In 1978, Ian
Wilson published an essay titled
The Turin Shroud: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?
It was a well written and a rather well researched book, following the story of the Shroud over almost 2,000 years, from Gospel descriptions to the latest scientific investigations from 1973. Out of this broad panorama, the author dedicated a chapter of some 15 pages to the investigation of a rather bold theory of his: there was in the history of the Shroud a “hole”, an empty space of about a century and a half (from 1204 to 1353) during which this object seems to disappear from historical sources. On the basis of evidence drawn both from documents and from objects the Templars had owned, the author maintained that the mysterious “
idol” worshipped by the Templars was in fact the shroud kept at present in Turin, folded on itself and kept in a container designed to show only the face. The theory made a great impression, because in its light several obscure points in the story of the Templars also became easily understandable;
Wilson, however, did not specialise in this subject, knew only the most famous sources on the
trial, and much precious data escaped him. In any case, those 15 pages contained an intuition of immense historical interest, and left the scholarly community with a burning curiosity that the few bits of evidence used could not possibly satisfy. In recent years, the sources on the
trial against the Templars have been investigated both in much greater depth and more systematically than had been the case in the past, and this has led us to bring to light historical truths that once seemed dubious, out of focus, indeed shadowy. Can they also tell us something about the relationship between the Templars and the Shroud? Luckily, yes, quite a bit; thanks mainly to some testimonies left as it were “hidden” in an authentic document little known to the experts. A document that seemed to have little to offer to the study of the political and judicial aspects of the
trial, but that could not matter more in the study of Templar spirituality. Templar experts barely mention these facts in their studies, and the same happens in another area that has been investigated by scientific methods for over a century: that is,
sindonology, the complex of studies about the Shroud of Turin. I think it better to show the reader this new evidence from Templar matters by discussing it on its own, that is, without reference to
Wilson’s theory: this is to avoid that two strands of argument should superimpose themselves on each other, and condition each other. We shall therefore see the bare sources, just as they appear to the researcher who first reads them, without influences gained from reading other studies. Later the material will be compared with
Wilson’s intuitions and we can verify what historical scenario arises from it.

Throughout the second phase of the
trial against the Templars, the one which took place after summer 1308 when the investigations were being carried out by diocesan bishops, the investigators began to be certain that the Templars’ “head” was in fact the reliquary of some saint, and started asking clear-headed questions to this purpose. A significant case is that of sergeant Guillaume
d’Erreblay, a sometime almsgiver for the King of France, who was questioned by the commission of bishops who managed the Paris investigation in 1309-1311. This man had often seen a handsome reliquary in silver used in the normal Temple liturgies, exhibited to the veneration of the faithful who came to pray in the Order’s churches. Some said that it was the reliquary of the Eleven Thousand Virgin companions of St.Ursula who were martyred in Cologne, and that was what he too had used to believe. However, after the arrest, and under the psychological power of the prosecution, it occurred to him that there were many odd things: for he seemed to recall that that reliquary had a monstrous aspect, with two faces, even, of which one had a beard.
[8]
A modern historian will suspect that the witness has been badly affected by the context of the
trial, to the point of talking nonsense: how could anyone exhibit to the veneration of the faithful the portrait of a girl saint – with two faces, and a beard besides? In fact, this Templar must have described two different objects. It was only from other brothers that he heard of the reliquary of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, while what he saw himself with his own eyes may indeed have had two faces. His description is identical to the miniatures painted by the painter Matteo Planisio on the manuscript Vaticano latino 3550, where the Creator is shown with two faces, one bearded and masculine (the Person of the Father) and one of an adolescent youth (the Son), who may well look like a woman’s. The superb Neapolitan miniature is one instance, who knows how many similar objects existed in mediaeval churches.