The Last Templar - Страница 16

Tess told Reilly how in a single incident that year, marauding Saracens ambushed and killed over three hundred pilgrims on the dangerous roads between the port city of Jaffa, where they landed on the coast of Palestine, and the holy city of Jerusalem. Bands of fighters soon became a fixture outside the walls of the city itself. And that's when the Templars first made their appearance. Nine pious knights led by Hughes de Payens arrived at Baldwin's palace in Jerusalem and offered their humble services to the king. They announced that they had taken the three solemn vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience but had added a fourth: a perpetual vow to protect the pilgrims on their journey from the coast to the city. Given the situation, the knights' arrival was very timely. The crusading state was in desperate need of trained fighters.

King Baldwin was very impressed by the religious knights' dedication and gave them quarters in the eastern part of his palace, which stood on the site once occupied by King Solomon's Temple. They became known as The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon— or, more simply, the Knights Templar.

Tess leaned in. "The religious significance of the site Baldwin gave the burgeoning order is key,"

she explained. Solomon had built the first tempie in 950 BC. His father David had started the work following God's command, building a temple to house the Ark of the Covenant, a portable shrine that contained the tablets of stone that were engraved with the commandments God gave Moses.

The glorious reign of Solomon came to a close with his death, when eastern nations moved in and conquered the Jewish lands. The Temple itself was destroyed in 586 BC by the invading Chaldeans, who proceeded to take the Jews back to Babylon as slaves. More than five hundred years later, the Temple was rebuilt by Herod in an attempt to ingratiate himself with his Jewish subjects and demonstrate to them that their king, despite his Arab origins, was a devout follower of his adopted religion. It would be his crowning achievement: prominently dominating the Kidron Valley, the new Temple was a magnificent and elaborate building of a far grander design than its predecessor.

Its inner sanctum, reached by two huge golden doors, housed the Holy of Holies, which was accessible only to the Jewish High Priest.

After Herod's death, the Jewish rebelliousness was rekindled, and by 66 AD, the insurgents were back in control of Palestine. The Roman emperor Vespasian dispatched his son Titus to put down the rebellion. After fierce fighting for over six months, Jerusalem finally fell to the Roman legions in 70 AD. Titus commanded that the city, whose population was by now totally annihilated, be razed. And so, "the most wonderful edifice ever seen or heard of," as it was described at the time by the historian Josephus, was lost again.

A second Jewish rebellion, less than a hundred years later, was also crushed by the Romans. This time, all Jews were banned from Jerusalem and sanctuaries to Zeus and to the Roman god-emperor Hadrian were built on the Temple Mount. Six hundred years later, the site would see the building of another holy shrine: with the rise of Islam and the conquering of Jerusalem by the Arabs, the location of the holiest site of Judaism was to be redefined as the place from which the prophet Mohammed's horse ascended to heaven. And so in 691 AD, the Dome of the Rock was built on the site by the Caliph Abd El-Malik. It has remained a shrine to Islam ever since, except for the period during which the Crusaders controlled the Holy Land when the Dome of the Rock was converted into a Christian church called the Templum Domini, the "Temple of our Lord," and when the Al-Aqsa mosque, built in the same compound, was turned into the headquarters of the burgeoning Knights Templar.

The heroic idea of nine brave knights valiantly defending the vulnerable pilgrims quickly captured people's imaginations across Europe. Many soon regarded the Templars with romantic reverence and offered themselves as new recruits. Nobles across Europe also paid generously to support them, showering them with gifts of money and land. This was all helped greatly by the fact that they were given papal blessings, a rare occurrence that meant a great deal at a time when all kings and all nations looked to the Papacy as the ultimate authority in Christendom. And so the Order grew, slowly at first, then much more rapidly. They were highly trained as fighters, and, as their successes in the field mounted, their activities widened. From their original mission of protecting the pilgrims, they gradually came to be regarded as the military defenders of the Holy Land.

In less than a hundred years, the Templars became one of the wealthiest and most influential bodies in Europe, second only to the Papacy itself, owning huge tracts of land in England, Scotland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Austria. And with such an extensive network of territories and castles, they soon established themselves as the world's first international bankers, arranging credit facilities for bankrupt royals across Europe, safeguarding the pilgrims' funds, and effectively inventing the concept of the traveler's check. Money in those days was just gold or silver, which was simply worth what it weighed. Instead of taking it with them and risking getting robbed, the pilgrims could deposit their money at a Templar house or castle anywhere in Europe, where they would be given a coded note for it. Once they reached their destination, they would go to the local Templar house, present the note, which would be decoded using their tightly guarded encryption practices, and draw that amount of money there.

***

Tess looked at Reilly to make sure he was still with her. "What started off as a small team of nine well-intentioned noblemen dedicated to defending the Holy Land from the Saracens quickly became the most powerful and most secretive organization of its time, rivaling the Vatican in terms of wealth and influence."

"Then it all went wrong for them, didn't it?" Reilly asked.

"Yes. In a big way. The Muslim armies finally recaptured the Holy Land in the thirteenth century and sent the Crusaders packing, this time for good. There were no further Crusades. The Templars were the last to leave, after their defeat at Acre in 1291. When they got back to Europe, their whole raison d'etre was gone. There were no pilgrims to escort, no Holy Land to defend. They had no home, no enemy, and no cause. And they didn't have too many friends either. All that power and wealth had gone to their heads, the poor soldiers of Christ weren't so poor anymore and had grown arrogant and greedy. And many royals, the king of France in particular, owed them a lot of money."

"And they came crashing down to earth."

"Crashed and burned," Tess nodded. "Literally." Tess took a sip from her coffee and told Reilly how a whisper campaign had started about the Templars, no doubt facilitated by the ritualistic secrecy with which the Order had conducted its initiation rites over the years. Soon, a shocking and outrageous litany of heresy charges was leveled at them.

"What happened then?"

"Friday the thirteenth," Tess answered wryly. "The original version."

Chapter 20

Paris, France—March 1314

Slowly, Jacques de Molay's consciousness returned. How long had it been this time ? An hour ?

Two? The grand master knew it couldn't possibly have been any longer than that. A few hours of unconsciousness would be a luxury that they would never allow.

As the mists receded from his mind, he felt the usual stirrings of pain, and, as usual, he banished them. The mind was a strange and powerful thing, and, after all these years of imprisonment and torture, he had learned to use it like a weapon. A defensive weapon, but a weapon nevertheless, one with which he could counter at least some of what his enemies tried to accomplish.

They could break his body, and they had, but his spirit and his mind, though damaged, were still his own.

As were his beliefs.

Opening his eyes, he saw that nothing had changed, although there was a curious difference he didn't recognize at first. The walls of the cellar were still covered with a green slime that leaked onto the roughly cobbled floor, a floor that was almost level from the accumulation of dust, dried blood, and excrement on it. How much of the filth had come from his own body? A lot of it, he feared. After all, he had been here for . . .

he concentrated his mind. Six years? Seven? Ample time in which to wreck his body.

Bones had been broken, allowed to reset crudely, then broken again. Joints had been wrenched apart, tendons severed. He knew that he couldn't do anything meaningful with his hands and arms, nor could he walk. But they couldn't stop the movement of his mind. That was free to roam, to leave these dark, miserable dungeons beneath the streets of Paris and travel . . . anywhere.

So, where would he go today? To the rolling farmlands of central France? To the foothills of the Alps? To the seashore, or beyond, back to his beloved Outremer?

I wonder, he thought, and not for the first time, if I'm insane? Probably, he decided. To suffer everything the torturers who ruled this underground hellhole had inflicted on him, there was no way he could have retained his sanity.

He concentrated a little harder on the time he had spent here. Now he had it. It was six and a half years since the night that the king's men had overrun the Paris Temple.

His Paris Temple.

It was on a Friday, he remembered. October 13, 1307. He'd been asleep, as had most of his fellow knights, when dozens of seneschals had stormed the preceptory at first light. The Knights Templar should have been better prepared. For months, he'd known that the venal king and his lackeys were trying to find a way to overturn the power of the Templars. That morning, they had finally summoned up the courage and the excuse. They had also found the stomach for a fight, and, although the knights didn't surrender easily, the king's men had surprise and numbers on their side and it wasn't long before the knights were overpowered.