The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (33 page)

Did da Vinci play a role in designing or building the complex system of flooding tunnels, artificial beaches, and clog-proof drains protected by eelgrass that became the Money Pit? One invention of this grand master was what he called the “cogged bracket,” a movable sluice. Grouping these sluices together, he said, could act as a barrier to the current. He could cause water to rise and fall. A series of sluices and dams could control the widest bodies of water, depending on just how many were used. He also invented a portable dredger that floated on two rafts.
³¹

In 1510 he wrote that he had decided to cut short his work on anatomy into order to put more time into his mechanical inventions. His writings may have served as a blueprint for his design of such a complicated vault and protective trap. Could a bay like Mahone in Nova Scotia be held back by a sluice of his design? Upon his death, thousands of pages of his notebooks were spread around Europe as collectors’ items. Many were illegible, and many were coded. Da Vinci had a shorthand that divided or combined words for reasons known only to himself. Some notes were written backward with his left hand so that a mirror was needed to read them. It is said that despite all the work that Leonardo da Vinci completed in his capacity as engineer and inventor, there is no monument, no completed work of his architecture that bears his name.

A recent book on one of the most controversial icons in Catholic history, the Shroud of Turin, declares that Leonardo da Vinci was the artist behind that sacred relic. The shroud, which is not claimed as a true relic by the Catholic Church, has been dated to medieval times or earlier. The provenance of the shroud is questionable; it arrived in France sometime after the Crusades but was denounced by the bishop of Troyes as a fake. It was then given to the House of Savoy and suddenly appeared again on exposition in France in 1492. The authors of the
Turin Shroud,
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, believe that da Vinci had invented a sort of proto-camera and captured his own image.
³²
Improved carbon dating now dates the shroud to an earlier period than was previously thought. But the authors of the
Turin Shroud
tell a very interesting biography of their own candidate for creator of the alleged fake.

An alchemist and a necromancer, da Vinci was troubled by his lack of sexual identity. The son of an unmarried Cathar woman, he may have been homosexual; he was accused of heresy along with a group of young men. At that time, such a charge was often taken to mean that the crime was sodomy, according to Picknett and Prince, who mention other indications of his orientation. His connection to the Medici family saved him.
³³
Turin Shroud
also asserts that, like many other alchemists, da Vinci was a devotee of the goddess Isis, the Black Madonna worshiped in secret in Christian Europe and venerated in hundreds of churches, grottoes, and caves. Whatever da Vinci’s shortcomings, there is no question of his being a master of many trades and, as a scientist, someone who could be considered a borderline heretic and magician. At the same time, he was a grand master in the same order that tied together the wealthy elite of France and Scotland.

If the moving of the treasure guarded by the Sinclairs took place at the time of the construction of Roslin, then it is possible that later in that century, when further discoveries of the western lands took place, the Sinclairs and their Guise counterparts in France felt there was a threat to its discovery. It was on the Feast of John the Baptist in 1497
that John Cabot, sailing from Bristol, England, landed in Nova Scotia. If fishermen from Europe had not been sailing to the Grand Banks of Canada earlier, they were now. Such fishermen were not potential colonists, although their tiny shacks dotted the Saint Lawrence Seaway, but Cartier and others threatened the secret lands with invaders. A simple mining tunnel and shaft might have been regarded as no longer safe for the treasures of the Templars. If the entire complex, complete with false beaches and flooding tunnels, had not been put in place earlier, there was suddenly a reason for it. In the dual role of Prieuré de Sion grand master and military engineer, could da Vinci have designed and planned for the protection of the treasures that the elite families controlled?

It is said that history is written by the victors. Those in power in Europe were a handful of elite families married to each other, if not always allied. They were the patrons of the arts and often had artists use their faces as those of religious personages. They commissioned the sciences, and they supported the writers, who in turn acted with due caution in not biting the proverbial feeding hand. Most likely, we will never know the full extent of the effect they had on history as it has been preserved for the twentieth-century reader.

The Prieuré de Sion and the New World

If these select families had a secret society that mysteriously placed great value on Saint John the Baptist, it is more than coincidence that John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, and Samuel de Champlain all reached the New World on his feast day. Is it then design that the capital of Newfoundland (Saint John’s), the original name of Prince Edward Island (Île-St-Jean, or Isle Saint John) and the capital and harbor of New Brunswick (Saint John) all commemorated that saint? Even the naming of the new continent leaves us with questions. John Cabot’s principal backer was Sheriffe Richard Amerike. The same year that Columbus reached America, relatives of his ex-employer sent Amerigo Vespucci to Seville to protect their interest. Vespucci, in the employ of the Medicis drew extensive maps for the newly explored lands. The duke of Lorraine’s salon in Sion-Vaudemont, that sacred pilgrimage site, bound the maps into books
with two famous mapmakers on the cover—Ptolemy of Greece and Amerigo Vespucci. The editor of this atlas commented that the continent should be named for Vespucci, a man of great ability. We are told in history books that the name “America” was an accident. Because it was placed on the map as someone’s name, people misinterpreted it to be the actual name of a place.

In
The
My
sterious History of Columbus,
John Noble Wilford points out just who might be responsible for such an accident.
³⁴
“In those days, a small group of scholarly clerics lived in obscurity at the ancient village of St. Die on the slopes of the Vosges Mountains in Lorraine.” These “obscure” clerics were not too obscure, since they had a printing press in the very early days of the availability of that invention, and they had a patron, René, duke of Lorraine. It is possible that the naming of America was more by design of the duke of Lorraine and his relatives, the heirs of “Good King René.” The duke of Lorraine married the sister of Connetable Bourbon, who was then grand master of the Prieuré de Sion. His brother-in-law was the employer of da Vinci. It could have been that Columbus, having left the employ of René d’Anjou and his group, discovered the continent for a rival Spanish dynasty. And it may have been pride that led the “salon” of the duke of Lorraine to deny Columbus the credit and instead give it to a current employee of their tight circle.

Later historians claimed that Vespucci actually sailed to the New World, and deserves a certain amount of credit for his own explorations, but the basis of this statement is flimsy. A letter in the possession of René, dubbed the Soderini letter, describing the voyage of Vespucci to America has proved to be a fabrication. Vespucci never left Europe, but he had powerful and well-connected friends.
³⁵
It is possible that it was the wish of this tight-knit group that the continent was best left secret. D’Anjou, and the St. Clairs had no interest in their secret lands being uncovered. Neither did their Italian contingent—the Medicis, the Sforzas, and the Estes. These Italian families shared control of northern Italy with the Zeno family, who had been equally secretive about the discovery. The voyage of Columbus changed all that. Suddenly, the Prieuré de Sion needed to assert their prior claim. They wanted the New World to be named by them and possibly even controlled by them.

In 1524 an Italian banker in the circle of the Medicis, Bonacorso Rucellai, backed another expedition to the New World. Rucellai was based in Lyons, where the Carolingian dynasty was no longer able to protect the Jews against the avarice of others who sought their property. Many Jews had converted, often more in name than in spirit. Rucellai hired a captain from another noble family to take charge of his exploratory journey. The Captain was Giovanni da Verrazano. The family crest of the Verrazanos was, remarkably, the six-pointed Star of David, a symbol of the bloodline of that Jewish king and those who claimed descent.

Verrazano took the Prieuré de Sions’ passion for the Arcadia theme to the New World. Sailing by a coast with tall trees, he said that it reminded him of Jacopo Sannazaro’s idyllic Greek land, and called the place Arcadia. The harbor now called Newport he dubbed Rhodes after the harbor in Greece. Rhode Island’s modern harbor city still debates the origin of the “Viking Tower”that Verrazano labeled as a “Norman villa”on his map. The secret lands of the Sinclairs were becoming less secret.

When Oliver Sinclair set sail in 1545, the grand master was Ferrante de Gonzaga, son of the Duke of Mantua and Isabella d’Este, da Vinci’s patron. Both Ferrante and Leonardo da Vinci assisted Charles de Montpensier in military operations in France.
³⁶
France and England were at war, and Scotland was dragged into the fray. After Oliver Sinclair left, the duke of Somerset attacked Scotland on the River Esk. Ten thousand Scots nobles and commoners were slaughtered in the action.

Mary Stuart, through her emissary, William Sinclair, asked France to send help, but France, even while declaring that Scotland was now part of France, failed to support her ally.
³⁷
England and Queen Elizabeth did not want a French queen on the Scottish throne, and Scotland, almost leaderless, was unable to protect itself. Scotland and the Sinclair family were backed into a corner.

King James VI of Scotland, who allowed his mother to be executed by Elizabeth without protest, was persuaded as the inheritor of the Scottish crown to grant land in the New World to those in his court. But he was no friend to the Catholic Sinclairs; instead, he distributed land and baronies to those Protestant members who later came to the support of Elizabeth in England. Sir William Alexander was given a charter for Nova Scotia—New Scotland—and even Sir Francis Bacon was numbered among the friends with a land grant in the New World.

Officially, Sir Francis Bacon was the Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Great Seal. Unofficially, he was connected to the “Invisible College” we have spoken about—the collection of scientists and alchemists, physicians and writers, that served as the conduit for an underground stream of knowledge. In those days, such knowledge could get one excommunicated or worse.
³⁸
This group resembled the Prieuré de Sion but held no Catholic leanings like the Guise-Lorraine families. Bacon was not able to reveal his secret side until he left government, and, as discussed, he very likely was a critic of the divine right of kings and the government in general in his disguised authorship of the Shakespearean texts. Under his own name he published an interesting work,
The New Atlantis
.

The so-called new Atlantis was very much like the Arcadia of the Catholic d’Anjous and St. Clairs—a utopia where the true Renaissance man could be free to publish and study science without fears of a censoring government or a church inquisition. The name of this utopia was Bensalem. Jerusalem means “Foundation of Salem,” and Bensalem means the “Son of Salem,” in the context of a second holy place. Here in “New Salem,” said Bacon, a secret society resided, to which few were admitted and even fewer were privy to the secrets. Was this Masonic-like society similar to the Prieuré de Sion? This secret society had as its founder a wise king, and the order this wise king started was called Solomon’s House. Bacon made a point of declaring that Jews were allowed to reside on the secret island and practice their arts and sciences.

In Bacon may lie the connection to a Merovingian-Davidic dynasty, forced underground first by Rome and later by the Roman Church. Even after England turned to the Protestant Reformation, this secret Jewish group still feared the repression of Europe. The secret society could also just have been a refuge for those who practiced astronomy, anatomy, geology, or just about any science and who would have been branded as heretics or witches—for whom Europe reserved its cruelest punishments. Or perhaps they were simply members of the Invisible College who wanted academic freedom. While this argument seems more credible, it
was Bacon’s own declaration that the secret society and their utopia were both very Jewish in background and tolerance.

In his writings Bacon discussed flasks of mercury as part of a system for hiding documents. On Oak Island such empty mercury flasks have been found.
³⁹
And, of course, so has a most complex feat of engineering, which may have been designed by another true Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci. Sir Francis Drake had the means and the money to put together an expedition to the Money Pit with the members of the Invisible College and even to bring along the designs of da Vinci to use in such a place. On the surface, it does not seem likely that devout Protestants and devout Catholics would act in collusion. The writings of Bacon and the Masonic concept of accepting common ground, however, suggest that a joint undertaking might have taken place, especially as a means to stop the monopoly over science, learning, and free thought that religion had seemingly claimed for itself.