The grand master included. Some let themselves be killed; they were probably chosen by lot. Others submitted, blending into the civilian landscape. What became of the minor officials, the lay brothers, the carpenters, the glaziers? That was how the Freemasons were born, later spreading throughout the world, as everyone knows. But in England things happened differently. The king resisted the pope’s pressure and pensioned the Templars off.
They lived out their days meekly, in the order’s great houses. Meekly—do you believe that? I don’t. In Spain the order changed its name to the order of Montesa. Gentlemen, these were men who could bring a king to heel; they held so many of his promissory notes that they could have bankrupted him in a week. The king of Portugal, for instance, came to terms. Let us handle it like this, dear friends, he said: Don’t call yourselves Knights of the Temple anymore; change the name to Knights of Christ, and I’ll be happy.
In Germany there were very few trials. The abolition of the order was purely formal, and in any case there was a brother order, the Teutonic Knights, who at the time were not merely a state within the state: they were the state, having acquired a territory as big as those countries now under the Russian heel, and they kept expanding until the end of the fifteenth century, when the Mongols arrived. But that’s another story, because the Mongols are at our gates even now. But I mustn’t digress.”
“Yes, let us not digress,” Belbo said.
“Well then. As everyone knows, two days before Philip issued the arrest warrant, and a month before it was carried out, a hay wain drawn by oxen left the precincts of the Temple for an unknown destination. Nostradamus himself alludes to it in one of his Centuries….” He looked through his manuscript for the quotation:
Souz la pasture d’animaux ruminant
par eux conduits au ventre herbipolique
soldats cachés, les armes bruit menant…
“The hay wain is a legend,” I said. “And I would hardly consider Nostradamus an authority in matters of historical fact.”
“People older than you, Signor Casaubon, have had faith in many of Nostradamus’s prophecies. Not that I am so ingenuous as to take the story of the hay wain literally. It’s a symbol—a symbol of the obvious, established fact that Jacques de Molay, anticipating his arrest, turned over command of the order, as well as its secret instructions, to a nephew, Comte de Beaujeu, who became the head of the now clandestine Temple.”
“Are there documents that bear this out?”
“Official history,” the colonel said with a bitter smile, “is written by the victors. According to official history, men like me don’t exist. No, behind the story of the hay wain lies something else. The Temple’s secret nucleus moved to a quiet spot, and from there they began to extend their underground network. This obvious fact was my starting point. For years—even before the war—I kept asking myself where these brothers in heroism might have gone.
When I retired to private life, I finally decided to look for a trail. Since the flight of the hay wain had occurred in France, France was where I should find the original gathering of the secret nucleus. But where in France?”
He had a sense of theater. Belbo and I were all ears. We could find nothing better to say than “Well, where?”
“I’ll tell you. Where would the Templars have hidden? Where did Hugues de Payns come from? Champagne, near Troyes. And at the time the Templars were founded, Champagne was ruled by Hugues de Champagne, who joined them in Jerusalem just a few years later. When he came back home, he apparently got in touch with the abbot of Citeaux and helped him initiate the study and translation of certain Hebrew texts in his monastery. Think about it: the White Benedictines—Saint Bernard’s Benedictines—also invited the rabbis of upper Burgundy to come to Citeaux, to study whatever texts Hugues had found in Palestine. Hugues even gave Saint Bernard’s monks a forest at Bar-surAube, where Clairvaux was later built. And what did Saint Bernard do?”
“He became the champion of the Templars,” I said.
“But why? Did you know he made the Templars even more powerful than the Benedictines? That he prohibited the Benedictines from receiving gifts of lands and houses, and had them give lands and houses to the Templars instead? Have you ever seen the Forêt d’Orient near Troyes? It’s immense, one commandery after the other. And in the meantime, you know, the knights in Palestine weren’t fighting. They were settled in the Temple, making friends with the Moslems instead of killing them.
They communicated with Moslem mystics. In other words, Saint Bernard, with the economic support of the counts of Champagne, built an order in the Holy Land that was in contact with Arab and Jewish secret sects. An unknown directorate ran the Crusades in an effort to keep the order going, and not the other way around. And it set up a network of power that was outside royal jurisdiction. I am a man of action, not a man of science. Instead of spinning empty conjectures, I did what all the long-winded scholars have never done: I went to the place the Templars came from, the place that had been their base for two centuries, their home, where they could live like fish in water….”
“Chairman Mao says that revolutionaries must live among the people like fish in water,” I said.
“Good for your chairman. But the Templars were preparing a revolution far greater than the revolution of your pigtailed communists.”
“They don’t wear pigtails anymore.”
“No? Well, so much the worse for them. As I was saying, the Templars must have sought refuge in Champagne. Payns? Troyes? The Eastern Forest? No. Payns was—and still is—a tiny village. At the time, it had a castle at most. Troyes was a city: too many of the king’s men around. The forest, which the Templars owned, was the first place the royal guards would look. Which they did, by the way. No, I said to myself, the only place that made sense was Provins.”
If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns.
—Thomas Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra, Amsterdam, Wolters, 1694, p. 38
“Why Provins?”
“Have you ever been to Provins? A magic place: you can feel it even today. Go there. A magic place, still redolent of secrets. In the eleventh century it was the seat of the Comte de Champagne, a free zone, where the central government couldn’t come snooping. The Templars were at home there; even today a street is named after them. There were churches, palaces, a castle overlooking the whole plain. And a lot of money, merchants doing business, fairs, confusion, where it was easy to pass unnoticed. But most important, something that has been there since prehistoric times: tunnels.
A network of tunnels—real catacombs—extends beneath the hill. Some tunnels are open to the public today. They were places where people could meet in secret, and if their enemies got in, the conspirators could disperse in a matter of seconds, disappearing into nowhere.
And if they were really familiar with the passages, they could exit in one direction and reappear in the opposite, on padded feet, like cats. They could sneak up behind the intruders and cut them down in the dark. As God is my witness, gentlemen, those tunnels are tailor-made for commandos. Quick and invisible, you slip in at night, knife between your teeth, a couple of grenades in hand, and your enemies die like rats!”
His eyes were shining. “Do you realize what a fabulous hiding place Provins must have been? A secret nucleus could meet underground, and the locals, even if they did see something, wouldn’t say a word. The king’s men, of course, did come to Provins. They arrested the Templars who were visible on the surface and took them to Paris. Reynaud de Provins was tortured, but didn’t talk. Clearly, the secret plan called for him to be arrested to make the king believe that Provins had been swept clean. But at the same time he was to give a signal, by refusing to talk: Provins will not yield—not Provins, where the new, underground Templars live on.
Some tunnels lead from building to building. You can enter a granary or a warehouse and come out in a church. Some tunnels are constructed with columns and vaulted ceilings. Even today, every house in the upper city still has a cellar with ogival vaults—there must be more than a hundred of them. And every cellar has an entrance to a tunnel.”
“Conjecture,” I said.
“No, young man, fact. You haven’t seen the tunnels of Provins. Room after room, deep in the earth, covered with ancient graffiti. The graffiti are found mostly in what speleologists call lateral cells. Hieratic drawings of druidic origin, scratched into the wall before the Romans came. Caesar passed overhead, while down below men plotted resistance, ambushes, spells.
There are Catharist symbols, too. Yes, gentlemen, the Cathars in Provence were wiped out, but there were Cathars in Champagne also, and they survived, meeting secretly in these catacombs of heresy. One hundred and eighty-three of them were burned aboveground, but the others hid below. The chronicles
