Holy Blood, Holy Grail (12 page)

Prior to 1112 the Cistercians were dangerously close to bankruptcy. Then, under Saint Bernard’s guidance, they underwent a dazzling change of fortune. Within the next few years half a dozen abbeys were established. By 1153 there were more than three hundred, of which Saint Bernard himself personally founded sixty-nine. This extraordinary growth directly parallels that of the Order of the Temple, which was expanding in the same way during the same years. And, as we have said, one of the co founders of the Order of the Temple was Saint Bernard’s uncle, Andre de Montbard.

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It is worth reviewing this complicated sequence of events. In 1104

the count of Champagne departed for the Holy Land after meeting with certain nobles, one of whom was connected with Andre de

Montbard. In 1112 Andre de Montbard’s nephew, Saint Bernard, joined the

Cistercian Order. In 1114 the count of Champagne departed on a second journey to the Holy Land, intending to join the Order of the Temple which was co-founded by his own vassal together with Andre de Montbard, and which, as the bishop of Chartres’s letter attests, was already in existence or in process of being established. In 1115 the count of Champagne returned to

Europe, having been gone for less than a year, and donated land for the

Abbey of Clairvaux whose abbot was Andre de Montbard’s nephew. In the years that followed both the Cistercians and the Templars both Saint Bernard’s order and Andre de Montbard’s became immensely wealthy and enjoyed phases of phenomenal growth.

As we pondered this sequence of events, we became increasingly convinced that there was some pattern underlying and governing such an intricate web.

It certainly did not appear to be random, nor wholly coincidental. On the contrary we seemed to be dealing with the vestiges of some complex and ambitious overall design, the full details of which had been lost to history. In order to reconstruct these details, we developed a tentative hypothesis a “scenario’, so to speak, which might accommodate the known facts.

We supposed that something was discovered in the Holy Land, either by accident or design something of immense import, which aroused the interest of some of Europe’s most influential noblemen. We further supposed that this discovery involved, directly or indirectly, a great deal of potential wealth as well, perhaps, as something else, something that had to be kept secret, something which could only be divulged to a small number of high-ranking lords. Finally, we supposed that this discovery was reported and discussed at the conclave of 1104.

Immediately thereafter the count of Champagne departed for the Holy Land himself, perhaps to verify personally what he had heard, perhaps to implement some course of action the foundation, for example, of what subsequently became the Order of the Temple. In 1114, if not before, the

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Templars were established with the count of Champagne playing some crucial role, perhaps acting as guiding spirit and sponsor. By 1115

money was already flowing back to Europe and into the coffers of the Cistercians, who, under Saint Bernard and from their new position of strength, endorsed and imparted credibility to the fledgling Order of the Temple.

Under Bernard the Cistercians attained a spiritual ascendancy in Europe.

Under Hugues de Payen and Andre de Montbard, the Templars attained a military and administrative ascendancy in the Holy Land which quickly spread back to Europe. Behind the growth of both orders loomed the shadowy presence of uncle and nephew, as well as the wealth, influence and patronage of the count of Champagne. These three individuals constitute a vital link. They are like markers breaking the surface of history, indicating the dim configurations of some elaborate, concealed design.

If such a design actually existed, it cannot, of course, be ascribed to these three men alone. On the contrary, it must have entailed a great deal of co-operation from certain other people and a great deal of meticulous organisation. Organisation is perhaps the key word; for if our hypothesis was correct, it would presuppose a degree of

organisation amounting to an order in itself a third and secret order behind the known and documented

Orders of the Cistercians and the Temple. Evidence for the existence for such a third order was not long in arriving.

In the meantime, we devoted our attention to the hypothetical “discovery’ in the Holy Land the speculative basis on which we had established our “scenario’. What might have been found there? To what might the Templars, along with Saint Bernard and the count of Champagne, have been privy? At the end of their history the Templars kept inviolate the secret of their treasure’s whereabouts and nature.

Not even documents survived. If the treasure in question were simply financial bullion, for example it would not have been necessary to destroy or conceal all records, all rules, all archives. The implication is that the Templars had something else in their custody, something so precious that not even torture would wring an intimation of it from their lips. Wealth alone could not have prompted such absolute and unanimous secrecy. Whatever it was had to do with other

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matters, like the Order’s attitude towards Jesus.

On October 13th, 1307, all Templars throughout France were arrested by

Philippe le Bel’s seneschals. But that statement is not quite true.

The

Templars of at least one preceptory slipped unscathed through the king’s net the preceptory of Bezu, adjacent to Rennes-leChateau. How and why did they escape? To answer that question, we were compelled to investigate the Order’s activities in the vicinity of Bezu. Those activities proved to have been fairly extensive. Indeed, there were some half dozen preceptories and other holdings in the area, which covered some twenty square miles.

In 1153 a nobleman of the region a nobleman with Cathar sympathies became fourth Grand Master of the Order of the Temple. His name was Bertrand de Blanchefort, and his ancestral home was situated on a mountain peak a few miles away from both Bezu and Rennes-leChateau.

Bertrand de

Blanchefort, who presided over the Order from 1153 until 1170, was probably the most significant of all Templar Grand Masters. Before his regime the

Order’s hierarchy and administrative structure were, at best, nebulous.

It was Bertrand who transformed the Knights Templar into the superbly efficient, well-organised and magnificently disciplined hierarchical institution they then became. It was Bertrand who launched their involvement in high-level diplomacy and international politics. It was

Bertrand who created for them a major sphere of interest in Europe, and particularly in France. And according to the evidence that survives, Bertrand’s mentor some historians even list him as the Grand Master immediately preceding Bertrand was Andre de Montbard.

Within a few years of the Templars’ incorporation, Bertrand had not only joined their ranks, but also conferred on them lands in the environs of

Rennes-leChateau and Bezu. And in 1156, under Bertrand’s regime as Grand

Master, the Order is said to have imported to the area a contingent of

German-speaking miners. These workers were supposedly subjected to a rigid, virtually military discipline. They were forbidden to fraternise in any way with the local population and were kept strictly segregated from the surrounding community. A special judicial body,

‘la Judicature des

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Allemands’, was even created to deal with legal technicalities pertaining to them. And their alleged task was to work the gold mines on the slopes of the mountain at

Blanchefort gold mines which had been utterly exhausted by the Romans nearly a thousand years before.-1s

During the seventeenth century engineers were commissioned to investigate the mineralogical prospects of the area and draw up detailed reports. In the course of his report one of them, Cesar d’Arcons, discussed the ruins he had found, remains of the German workers’ activity. On the basis of his research, he declared that the German workers did not seem to have been engaged in mining.3’ In what, then, were they engaged? Cesar d’Arcons was unsure smelting perhaps, melting something down, constructing something out of metal, perhaps even excavating a subterranean crypt of some sort and creating a species of depository.

Whatever the answer to this enigma, there had been a Templar presence in the vicinity of Rennes-leChateau since at least the mid-twelfth century.

By 1285 there was a major preceptory a few miles from Bezu, at Campagnesur-Aude. Yet near the end of the thirteenth century, Pierre de Voisins, lord of Bezu and Rennes-leChateau, invited a separate detachment of

Templars to the area, a special detachment from the Aragonese province of

Roussillon.38 This fresh detachment established itself on the summit of the mountain of Bezu, erecting a lookout post and a chapel.

Ostensibly, the

Roussillon Templars had been invited to Bezu to maintain the security of the region and protect the pilgrim route which ran through the valley to

Santiago de Compastela in Spain. But it is unclear why these extra knights should have been required. In the first place they cannot have been very numerous not enough to make a significant difference. In the second place there were already Templars in the neighbourhood.

Finally, Pierre de

Voisins had troops of his own, who, together with the Templars already there, could guarantee the safety of the environs. Why, then, did the

Roussillon Templars come to Bezu? According to local tradition, they came to spy. And to exploit or bury or guard a treasure of some sort.

Whatever their mysterious mission, they obviously enjoyed some kind of special immunity. Alone of all Templars in France, they were left

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unmolested by Philippe le Bel’s seneschals on October 13th, 1307. On that fateful day the commander of the Templar contingent at Bezu was a Seigneur de Goth .39 And before taking the name of Pope Clement V, the archbishop of Bordeaux King

Philippe’s vacillating pawn was Bertrand de Goth. Moreover, the new pontiff’s mother was Ida de Blanchefort, of the same family as Bertrand de

Blanchefort. Was the pope then privy to some secret entrusted to the custody of his family a secret which remained in the Blanchefort family until the eighteenth century, when the Abbe Antoine Bigou, cure of Rennes-leChateau and confessor to Marie de Blanchefort, composed the parchments found by

Sauniere? If this were the case, the pope might well have extended some sort of immunity to his relative commanding the Templars at Bezu.

The history of the Templars near Rennes-leChateau was clearly as fraught with perplexing enigmas as the history of the Order in general. Indeed, there were a number of factors the role of Bertrand de Blanchefort, for example which seemed to constitute a discernible link between the general and the more localised enigmas.

In the meantime, however, we were confronted with a daunting array of coincidences coincidences too numerous to be truly coincidental. Were we in fact dealing with a calculated pattern? If so, the obvious question was who devised it, for patterns of such intricacy do not devise themselves.

All the evidence available to us pointed to meticulous planning and careful organisation so much so that increasingly we suspected there must be a specific group of individuals, perhaps comprising an order of some sort, working assiduously behind the scenes. We did not have to seek confirmation for the existence of such an order. The confirmation

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thrust itself upon us. 4 Secret Documents

Confirmation of a third order an order behind both the Templars and the

Cistercians thrust itself upon us. At first, however, we could not take it seriously. It seemed to issue from too unreliable, too vague and nebulous a source. Until we could authenticate the veracity of this source, we could not believe its claims.

In 1956 a series of hooks, articles, pamphlets and other documents relating to Berenger Sauniere and the enigma of Rennes-leChateau began to appear in

France. This material has steadily proliferated, and is now voluminous.

Indeed, it has come to constitute the basis for a veritable ‘industry’. And its sheer quantity, as well as the effort and resources involved in producing and disseminating it, implicitly attest to something of immense but as yet unexplained import.

Not surprisingly, the affair has served to whet the appetites of numerous independent researchers like ourselves, whose works have added to the corpus of material available.

The original material, however, seems to have issued from a single specific source.

Someone clearly has a vested interest in ‘promoting’ Rennes-leChateau, in drawing public attention to the story, in generating publicity and further investigation. Whatever else it might be, this vested interest does not appear to be financial. On the contrary, it would appear to be more in the order of propaganda propaganda which establishes credibility for something. And whoever the individuals responsible for this propaganda may be, they have endeavoured to focus spotlights on certain issues while keeping themselves scrupulously in the shadows.

Since 1956 a quantity of relevant material has been deliberately and systematically

‘leaked’, in a piecemeal fashion, fragment by fragment.

Most of these fragments purport to issue, implicitly or explicitly,

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from some ‘privileged’ or “inside’ source. Most contain additional information, which supplements what was known before and thus contributes to the overall jigsaw. Neither the import nor the meaning of the overall jigsaw has yet been made clear, however. Instead, every new snippet of information has done more to intensify than to dispel the mystery. The result has been an ever-proliferating network of seductive allusions, provocative hints, suggestive cross-references and connections. In confronting the welter of data now available, the reader may well feel he is being toyed with, or being ingeniously and skilfully led from conclusion to conclusion by successive carrots dangled before his nose. And underlying it all is the constant, pervasive intimation of a secret a secret of monumental and explosive proportions.