On the trail of the Templar treasures. Order of the Knights Templar
According to legend, the Knights Templar appeared in Palestine after the First Crusade. In 1119-1120, the Burgundian knights Gug de Pen and Gottfried Saint-Omer, in alliance with 7 other knights, founded a small military brotherhood to guard the roads leading to Jerusalem. After some time, all members of the brotherhood made a vow to the Jerusalem Patriarch and adopted a number of articles of the Benedictine monastic charter. King Baldwin of Flanders, the head of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, organized by the crusaders in Palestine, allocated a building for the order next to the mosque, which supposedly stood on the site where the temple of Solomon was in biblical times. Since that time, the order began to be called the Order of the Poor Brothers of Christ from the Temple of Solomon, or simply the Order of the Templars (Templars).
Since that time, the popes, as if competing with each other, did not tire of pouring favors on the templars. The Templars were given the right to build their own churches and have their own cemeteries. They could not be excommunicated from the church, they also received the right to remove the excommunication that the church imposed. All property of the Order of the Knights Templar, both movable and immovable, was exempted from church tax, and the tithe, which they themselves collected, went all to the Templar treasury. The knights of the temple had their own clergy, independent of church authority. The bishops were forbidden to interfere in the life of the order, to prosecute or fine the people of the order. Not a single spiritual-knightly order - and there were many of them founded in Palestine - were not endowed with such broad rights and privileges.
Not surprisingly, soon after its founding, the Knights Templar began to flourish rapidly. Its center was in Palestine, but in the Kingdom of Jerusalem there was only one of the priories of the order. Similar priories were located in Tripolitania, Antioch, Poitou, England, the lands of the French Kingdom, Portugal, Aragon, Hungary, Ireland and Poland.
The wealth of the Templars already in the second half of the XII century amazed the imagination. The "brothers of Christ" owned lands, fortified castles, houses in cities, various movable property and innumerable amounts of gold. Suffice it to recall that the Templars bought the island of Cyprus from the English king Richard I for an unimaginable amount at that time of 100,000 Byzantium (880,000 gold rubles).
The source of these countless treasures of the Templars was not only military booty, donations of believers and gifts of monarchs, but also usury, set by the order at a level unattainable for those times. With priories in all the states of Europe and the Middle East, the templars invented the non-cash transfer of money, when gold was not physically transported, but transferred from account to account by letters of the priory treasurers.
The Templars made money loans, usually on a mortgage. If it was a question of kings or influential feudal lords, the mortgage for the sake of decency was formalized as "transfer for storage." In 1204, for example, the King of England John Landless "deposited" the crown jewels in the London Temple, and in 1220 the English Templars even had a large royal seal of England. Templars often took important government documents for safekeeping. Thus, the original of the agreement concluded in 1258 between the King of France Louis the Holy and the ambassador of the English king Henry III was kept in the Paris Temple; in 1261 there was also the crown of the kings of England, which was kept by the Templars for 10 years.
It cannot be ruled out that, accepting important state documents for safekeeping and giving loans to kings against them, the templars unobtrusively threatened them with blackmail: in the event of non-payment of the debt, the disclosure of the content of some documents could cause grandiose scandals in the royal houses of Europe. This is exactly what happened with the secret treaty between John Landless and his aunt Berenger. Since 1214, the treaty was kept by the London Templars, and later was made public by them.
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In addition to cashless money transfer, the templars invented many other banking innovations. They invented a system of bank representations, separated banking proper from merchant trade, invented a system of checks and letters of credit, and introduced a "current account" into everyday life. All basic banking operations, in fact, were invented and tested by the Templars. The famous Florentine and Jewish bankers of the Renaissance were nothing more than mere imitators of the "poor brothers of Christ of Solomon's temple."
It is not surprising that the templars began to deify the yellow metal. The spoilage of the gold coin, which the kings of France repeatedly tried to carry out, they perceived as sacrilege and in every way prevented it, realizing what colossal damage a decrease in the content of gold in the coin can cause to their well-established financial system. No wonder it was in the Parisian Temple that the reference gold livre was kept. Perhaps, researchers are not far from the truth, suggesting that in the Middle East the templars adopted a certain esoteric teaching, rooted in the ancient Phoenicians and Carthaginians, who sacralized gold, endowing it with the magical ability to accumulate power and luck.
While the Templars accumulated wealth and bought up land in Europe, the affairs of the crusaders in Palestine went from bad to worse. After Sultan Saladin inflicted a crushing defeat on the Christian army at the Battle of Lake Tiberias and took possession of Jerusalem, it was only a matter of time before the crusaders were driven out of Palestine. In 1291 the Crusaders surrendered their last fortress in the Middle East and fled to Europe.
Unlike other spiritual-knightly orders, the Templars took the loss of Palestine rather calmly. Their possessions in Europe were quite large, and their wealth was enormous. The position of the templars in France was especially strong: a significant part of the templars came from the French nobility. And they were so proficient in financial matters that they often headed the treasury of their kingdom, acting as modern finance ministers.
It seemed that nothing could threaten the well-being of the order, but clouds were already gathering over the heads of the arrogant knights of the order. That was the time of the reign in France of King Philip IV (1285-1314) from the Capetian dynasty, called the Beautiful. The king is smart, cruel and power-hungry, he devoted his whole life to the struggle for a united, powerful, centralized France. And, of course, in his plans for the arrangement of the state there was no place for the Order of the Knights Templar, in whose domain neither royal nor general church laws were in force. The monarch was also worried about the growing influence of the order on the finances of the kingdom. By the end of the 13th century, the revenues of the order in France were several times higher than the revenues of the royal treasury, that is, the knights of the order, in fact, began to determine the financial policy of the state. The king and his council decided to end the hegemony of the order in the kingdom …
Popular support was on the side of the monarch. The reputation of the order among the common people was severely damaged at that time. In the minds of a man of the Middle Ages, the nobility of origin and military valor were incompatible with the practice of usury. That is why the attitude towards the knight-bankers was then much worse than towards ordinary usurers. The arrogance of the templars, their contempt for local customs and traditions, as well as the atmosphere of mystery with which they surrounded their activities, led to the fact that the most gloomy rumors began to spread among the people: they said that the templars were infected in the East with some heresy, that they had renounced from Christ and celebrate the "black mass" that the Templars indulge in unnatural orgies at their secret meetings.
After a long struggle, Philip the Fair literally snatched Pope Clement V's consent to initiate an inquisition against the Templar Order on suspicion of heresy on the basis of "bad rumor". On the night of October 13, 1307, all the Templars in France were arrested. And at the same time, the government seized all movable and immovable property of the order. During the investigation, which lasted more than one year, most of the knights under torture confessed to the most terrible sins for a Christian: worshiping the devil, desecrating the sacrament, sacrificing newborn babies to Satan, sin of Sodom, and much more.
1312, May 2 - Clement V announced the bull, in which the Order of the Templars was declared abolished. Most of its members were sentenced to life imprisonment by the Inquisitorial Tribunal, and the leading core, which during the trial retracted its previous testimony as forced by torture, was condemned to burn for re-falling into heresy. The same fate was in store for the last Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Molay, and his companion-in-arms, the Prior of Normandy, Geoffroy de Charnet. They went to the fire in the square in front of Notre Dame in Paris on March 18, 1314, in the presence of the monarch, bishops and many citizens. Already from the fire, according to legend, Jacques de Molay cursed the French king, Pope Clement and the royal legist Guillaume Nogaret, who took the most active part in the persecution of the templars.
According to the papal bull of 1312, all the property of the templars on French territory was transferred to the Order of the Hospitallers, and all movable property, including the treasury of the order, was subject to confiscation and transfer to the king's disposal. Alas, the Templar persecutors were in for a severe disappointment: the treasures of the Templar Order disappeared without a trace! Historians are still arguing about the fate of the Templar treasures, and treasure hunters are still looking for it …
Bloody footprints of templar treasures
1982 - The book "Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" was published in London, shedding an absolutely new light on the entire history of the spiritual-knightly orders in general and on the Templar Order in particular. Its authors - G. Lincoln, R. Lee and M. Baigent - having studied the archival documents, came to the conclusion that the above official history of the Templar Order is nothing more than a myth!
According to the authors, already at the very moment of its foundation, the Order of the Poor Brothers of Christ from the Temple of Solomon was not an independent organization, but a military branch of another, deeply conspiratorial, the so-called Order of Zion, which appeared at the turn of the XI-XII centuries. The Knights of the Order of Notre Dame of Zion, who took their name from the Abbey of St. Mary and the Holy Spirit on Mount Zion, where the seat of their leadership was located, created a secret society with a rigid hierarchy, all members of which were divided into 7 degrees.
In 1118, the fifth degree - the crusaders of St. John - was transformed into the Order of the Knights of John of Jerusalem (Hospitallers, Johannites, Maltese). Almost simultaneously, the Templars stand out from the Order of Zion, and 80 years later, from the Hospitallers - the “brothers of the German house” - the notorious Teutonic Order. Thus, the three most famous spiritual knightly orders were founded by the same secret organization, as if representing its legal parts.
After the loss of Palestine, the Order of Zion went into the shadows, but does not cease to lead its legal branches. Probably, the "priors of Zion" foresaw the sad end of the Order of the Knights Templar and took measures in advance. It seems that they made a cruel decision: not to waste energy on saving the compromised templars in the name of saving the main thing - the structure of their supranational empire, its wealth and connections.
The leadership of the Order of Zion doomed the Templars who fell under the inquisitorial investigation to death, ordering them to confess their most terrible sins. This turned the case of the Templars into a usual inquisitorial investigation in heresy and witchcraft for those times and led the investigation away from the main thing - the existence of an international branched secret organization capable of achieving its goals regardless of the interests of secular and church authorities. And, of course, the leadership of the Order of Zion was not going to give their treasures to these authorities, only nominally belonging to the Templar branch.
Because the leaders of the Order of Zion had guessed about the impending events several years before they happened, they had time to take out their treasures. They had enough opportunities for this. But their choice fell on England, which they seem to have chosen as an instrument of revenge against France for the defeat of the Knights Templar …
When the so-called Hundred Years War broke out between the British and the French in 1337, England's military successes stunned contemporaries. Indeed, at that time England was not the rich, powerful power that we see it in subsequent centuries, but the poor backwaters of the then Europe, militarily not comparable with France. And suddenly at the disposal of Edward III - the monarch of a poor kingdom - there is a myriad of gold. The then English gold "Noble" played at the initial stage of the Hundred Years War no less role than the arrow of the English archer. It was with gold that the English won the favor of the Gascon and Bordeaux chivalry; it was gold that bribed the municipalities of the French cities, which came under the rule of the king of England; it was gold that paid for numerous "white" and "free" detachments of archers,professional mercenary infantry, which won glory to the British at Cressy and Poitiers.
The revenge of the Order of Zion was a success. After the military defeats, famine, devastation, feudal civil strife, popular revolts came to the lands of France; entire areas of the kingdom for decades were plunged into a state of bloody anarchy. And all this was done with gold, the origin of which has puzzled historians to this day.
Reflections of the Templar Treasures in the History of Alchemy
Having conceived to finance vengeance, the leaders of the Order of Zion knew that it was impossible to openly, legally transfer the hidden Templar gold to the King of England. The Templars were officially banned, and according to the papal bull, all their movable and immovable property had already new owners, including the Roman high priest. Having discovered empty vaults in the Templar residences, the papal agents watched with attention whether jewelry of unknown origin would appear somewhere in Europe. And the royal house of England could not be accused of appropriating the gold of heretics through the mouth of the pope himself.
It was necessary to find a way to "launder" the Templar gold, and it is possible that it was proposed by none other than the then Grand Master of the Zion Order, Guillaume de Gisor, who was fond of alchemy, among other "hermetic" sciences.
Now in all encyclopedic dictionaries, you can read that alchemy is a research that set as its goal the so-called transmutation, that is, the transformation of base metals into gold with the help of a special substance - the philosopher's stone. But if you take the most ancient alchemical treatises, and they are considered the Leiden papyri, attributed to the III-VII centuries, they say about such secrets of the craft as hardening, gilding and silvering of metals, making alloys, glass and artificial precious stones, preparing medicines, dyeing fabrics, and there is not a word about transmutation of metals.
Nor is it written about transmutation in later manuscripts. And suddenly, as if a dam burst: from the beginning of the XIV century, attempts to turn base metals into gold became predominant in alchemical treatises. Europe is seized by a kind of "gold rush". There seems to be no doctor or pharmacist who has not tried to discover the secret of obtaining gold. Whole quarters of alchemists began to appear in European cities. Laboratories are organized at royal palaces and monasteries; merchants, feudal lords and princes of the church spend fortunes to finance the work of alchemists. Madness lasts more than 400 years, the last outbursts of the alchemical boom reach the 18th century, and in Italy even the 19th century.
Epidemics of this kind never appear out of nowhere, they are necessarily preceded by some extraordinary real events that struck contemporaries. There was such an event at the origins of the transmutation direction in alchemy. In the early years of the XIV century, the mysterious "enlightened doctor" Raymond Llull, by order of the English king Edward I, produced 25 tons (!) Of gold! The coins minted from it have survived to this day, and the most picky analyzes have shown: Llull's gold is real.
There is, as it were, the official biography of Llull, according to which he comes from a wealthy family, was born on the island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean in 1232 or 1235. He spent his youth at the Aragonese royal court and was even the tutor of the heir to Jacob II. Then he suddenly became interested in mysticism, plunged into the study of theology and oriental languages. He left the yard, moved to France, studied at the University of Paris, became a doctor of theology. They say that Lul-li agreed to make gold for Edward I on the condition that he organize a new crusade against the Muslims for this gold, but the king deceived the scientist: he took the gold, but did not go on the campaign. The indignant old scientist in 1307 (the year of the arrest of the French Templars!) Left England for North Africa, where he was stoned for preaching Christianity among Muslims.
There is every reason to assume that this biography is a deliberately written and put into use legend. Llull never practiced alchemy. All alchemical treatises attributed to him were written by unknown authors in the 15th – 16th centuries. For them, historians even have a special term - "falsely". Lully's real scholarly specialty was not alchemy, but scholastic logic, to which his book The Great Art is devoted - the only one whose authorship undoubtedly belongs to him.
The leadership of the Order of Zion needed not Lull's alchemical knowledge, but his high scientific authority among the scholastics and theologians, who at that time determined the scientific views of Europeans. An authority that was supposed to make the entire enlightened society believe that a reliable way had been found to turn simple metals into gold, and thereby legalize the gold of the Templars. Llull undertook to play this role, apparently because he was close to the leaders of the Zion Order, and perhaps was himself a member of it. This is evidenced by his frequent mysterious travels from country to country, as well as the motto that is present in his portraits: "My light is God himself." This motto was inscribed on the banner that flew over the last Templar fortress in the Middle East.
Of course, Llull was privy to the secret of the intrigue. Gold has long been in England, and he only needed to pretend that he was making it from mercury. Once the deception took root, his mission was over. He left London in 1307, and in the same year, King Edward I died. The Zion priors prudently refused to deal with his successor Edward II, a weak and depraved man, and waited for Edward III to ascend the throne of England, who started the Hundred Years War.
The doctrine of transmutation, which over time became the main content of alchemy, is not the only trace left by the activities of the Order of Zion in European history. Lee, Baigent and Lincoln cite information that the "Zion Priors" contributed to the schism of the Catholic Church, and one of the pillars of Protestantism - Zwingli - was a member of the Zion Order. In their opinion, the members of the Hussite movement and the prominent figure of the Czech reformation Amos Comenius maintained ties with the order.
The Renaissance in Italy was partly initiated by the Order of Zion, whose knights were traditionally almost all the men of the Medici family, as well as Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Caravaggio, Durer. Protestant pastor Johann Andrea (1586-1654) - the founder of the Order of the Rosicrucians, from 1637 to 1654 was the "helmsman" - the Grand Master of the Zion Order. In the future, this post was held by the famous scientists Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. The Knight of the Order of Zion was Joachim Jungius (1587-1654), the founder of the united "Society of Alchemists". Many of the researchers believe that it was as a result of the merger of the Rosicrucian Order and the alchemical brotherhoods of Jungius that modern elite Freemasonry was born. Let's make a reservation right away that the membership of the above-mentioned famous figures in the Order of Zion is not strictly documented. The conclusions of the British researchers are based on the analysis of indirect documents and sources, but many of their assumptions look quite logical.
Having safely escaped the hardships that befell other spiritual and knightly orders of the era of the Crusades, the Order of Zion has survived to our time. Today it is officially a club organization, which proclaimed its goal to restore the Merovingian dynasty to the French throne, which was suppressed in the 8th century. But is there any confidence that the knights of the order today do not carry out operations, before which the "alchemical" gold of the Templars fades?
V. Smirnov