Once, when I was giving a lecture to students about the topics of modern political journalism, someone asked me what you can write about when there is absolutely nothing to write, but you have to write. “Write about the gold of the party,” I advised. - Nobody knows whether it was at all and how much it was, but logic dictates that it should have been, and that there was a lot of it. And no one knows what happened, so you have a lot of room for imagination, but people really love to read about money! " "And if on a historical theme?" “Then there is no better theme of the Templars' gold! Nobody really knows anything about him either, but it should have been! " But I didn’t say anything to them more precisely. But I looked, thought, and I got this kind of material about "money", about which we all love to read.
Burning of Jacques de Molay and the Prior of Normandy. Miniature from Saint Denis Chronicle of France. End of the 14th century British Library.
As you know, the Order of the Templars arose after the first crusade, namely in 1119-1120, the Burgundian knights created it in Palestine, and there were only nine of them. Some time later, all members of this brotherhood took a vow of monasticism to the Patriarch of Jerusalem and adopted the corresponding charter, and the king of the Kingdom of Jerusalem gave them a house next to a Muslim mosque, which was located exactly on the very place where the temple of King Solomon was built in biblical times. That is why their order was called the Order of the Templars and Templars - from the word temple - temple.
Map of Jerusalem, 1200. From a medieval manuscript. In the upper right quarter of the blue circle, which marks the ring of the walls of Jerusalem, is the "Temple of Solomon" - the residence of the Templars.
After that, the popes, as if competing with one another, began to shower the order with favors and patronize it in every possible way. The Templars were given the right to build their own churches and even have their own cemeteries. They could not be excommunicated from the church, but they had the right of excommunication, imposed by the church, to be removed. All their property was exempted from church taxes, and the tithe, which they themselves collected, remained entirely in the treasury of the Order.
The Knights of the Temple had their own clergy, which did not depend on the church hierarchs. Thus, the bishops had no right to interfere in their life, bring the Order to trial or fine its people. None of the spiritual-knightly orders, and then many of them were founded in the Holy Land, had such broad rights and privileges. Therefore, it is not surprising that very soon the Order began to flourish.
Knight Templar. Westminster Psalter. 1250 Bodleian Library. Oxford.
Although the headquarters of the Knights Templar was in Palestine, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was only one of its priories. The order had exactly the same priories in Tripolitania, Antioch, Poitou, England, in the lands of the then French Kingdom, Portugal, Aragon, Apulia, Hungary, Ireland and even in distant Poland. As a result, the templars became so rich already in the second half of the 12th century that it boggled the imagination of their contemporaries.
Knights with an eight-pointed cross on their chest owned lands, powerful castles, in the cities they owned tenement houses, in the countryside - farms, and they also had an incredible amount of gold. Incredible? Of course incredible, because in 1192 they paid the English king Richard I for the island of Cyprus an absolutely unthinkable amount of 100,000 Byzantium (800,000 gold rubles) for that time. But the most important thing is that the source of this wealth was by no means war booty, although it was also considerable, and not the donations of naive believers, and not even gifts from the monarchs who thus bought the loyalty of the Templars, but … the usual usury, erected by the templars for an unprecedented time level.
Effigies of the Templars at Tamle Church in London.
The fact is that, having priories in all the states of Europe and the Middle East, the Templars invented a non-cash method of transferring money, in which gold no longer needed to be carried with you, but it was possible to receive it by letters of loan from treasurers in the priories. And since these priories, like a spider's web, covered the entire Christian world of that time, no other secular usurer could provide such a service to clients, but it was easy for the templars. In addition, it was they who came up with the system of checks and letters of credit to bearer, and introduced into use such a concept as "current account". And they also gave money loans to the sovereigns, moreover, on the security of profitable lands, and even state treasures!
London Temple inside.
So, in 1204, for example, the King of England John Landless "deposited" his crown jewels in the London Temple Castle, and in 1220 even the large royal seal of England got into the "safekeeping" of the English Templars, and in order to attach it to the document, the king had to send people to the Templars for her! Then, in 1261, the crown of the English kings, which had been kept by the Templars for ten years, also got there.
In the Parisian castle of the Order, the knights kept the original agreement between the French King Louis Saint and the ambassador of King Henry III of England, concluded in 1258. And here we can reasonably assume that, having such significant items, the Templars threatened the monarchs with blackmail - the disclosure of the contents of some important papers could well have caused scandals and even wars between the royal houses of Europe.
Seal of Edward I. Tower of London.
So both the famous Italian and Jewish bankers of the Renaissance were nothing more than weak imitators of the "poor knights" who were once really so poor that they rode the same horse in twos! It is hardly surprising that the Templars were the first Europeans to take gold seriously. Therefore, they perceived the damage of the gold coin, which the French kings repeatedly tried to carry out, and treated it as sacrilege, and resisted it in every way, realizing the enormous damage that a decrease in the gold content in the coin would cause their well-oiled financial machine to be especially painful.
Penny Edward I 1279-1307
And then they completely inflicted a blow on the French kings with an unprecedented force: they minted and began to keep the standard gold livre in their Temple. So now any gold coin that was different from him was declared fake and was not accepted by them in their calculations!
However, while the Templars were getting rich and acquiring land in Europe, things were going very badly in Palestine. Sultan Saladin took Jerusalem, and in 1291 the crusaders also lost the last fortress in Palestine and were forced to go home. True, the Templars did not suffer much in this case. Their riches were great, there was a lot of land - what else do the knight brothers need?
Edward I takes homage (sworn oath) to King Philip the Handsome of France June 5, 1286 Great Chronicle of France, Jean Fouquet, 1455-1460. National Library of France.
But the Templars in France had a particularly strong position, where many of the knights of this order were French nobles or had them as their ancestors. It was the Templars who acted as modern finance ministers at many royal houses. Everything looked as if no trouble could fundamentally threaten the well-being of the order, but trouble was already behind them!
The King of France Philip IV (1285-1314) Capetian, nicknamed the Beautiful, strove for unlimited power and could not, of course, even in his thoughts, admit that in his country there could be a force equal in power to that of his, the king! The king was concerned that the Order in France had too much land and … money, and, in fact, was a state within a state.
Popular support (oh, already this popular support!) - "since he is rich, then he steals" was also on the side of the king. The fact is that in the minds of the people of the Middle Ages, noble birth and knightly prowess were absolutely incompatible with such an occupation as usury, which only Lombards and Jews could engage in. Therefore, the attitude towards the knights-bankers was much worse than towards the Italian and Jewish usurers, who were considered despicable people, although the Templars took less interest. The arrogance of the templars, their contempt for the "good old" customs and local traditions, as well as the atmosphere of complete secrecy that reigned among them, with which they surrounded all their activities, also played a role. All this led to the fact that rumors began to arise among the people due to a lack of information. This always happens, but the Knights Templar did not study Lassuela's information theory. They began to say that they had brought a certain heresy to the East, that they renounce Christ, worship the head of a cat and indulge in Sodom's sin.
"Thin rumor" is a dangerous thing. It was under the pretext that they "say" that on the night of October 13, 1307, by order of the King of France, all the Templars in the country were arrested, and all their property fell under him. The investigation was conducted for several years, and it would even be strange if during this time most of the knights did not confess to the most terrible deeds for a Christian: that they worshiped the devil, in the desecration of the Holy Communion, desecration of the crucifix, the murder of newborn babies, the sin of Sodom and many other equally vile sins.
On May 2, 1312, Pope Clement V abolished the order with his bull. A significant part of the Templars were sentenced to life imprisonment, and the entire elite of the order, who at the trial rejected their previous testimony as given under torture, were condemned to be burned at the stake, as having fallen into heresy for the second time. As you know, they burned Jacques de Molay and his comrade-in-arms, the Prior of Normandy Geoffroy de Charnay.
Alas, but the king faced a severe disappointment: the treasury of the order disappeared without a trace! And the Templars' gold has not yet been found! Until now, masonry diggers are looking for him, historians argue about him, but no one has become richer from this …
In 1982, the book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" was published in London, the authors of which G. Lincoln, R. Lee and M. Baigent are said to have deeply studied archival documents, and on their basis they concluded that the official history of the Templars - myth!
In fact, this order was only part of another, the so-called … Order of Zion, which appeared at the turn of the XI-XII centuries. What was this order, the name of which comes from the name of the abbey of St. Mary and the Holy Spirit on Mount Zion, with a rigid hierarchy, divided into seven degrees? In 1118, his fifth degree - the Crusaders of St. John - became the Order of the Knights of John of Jerusalem (Hospitallers, Johannites), and almost simultaneously the Templars also emerged from it, and then the Teutonic Order. That is, all these three orders were only legal parts of an illegal association. Here's how!
Then, with the fall of Palestine, the Zion Order goes even further into the shadows, but still leads its legal "offshoots". And, according to the authors, foreseeing the sad fate of the Order of the Templars, the "Zionists" took action. The decision they made was cruel: not to waste efforts on the compromised templars, but to save the main thing - their supranational empire, its wealth and connections.
And of course, the Order of Zion did not want to give anyone their gold, only nominally belonging to its branch in the person of the Templars.
And since, according to the authors, the "Zionists" guessed about future events a few years before they all happened (and where did they come from such clairvoyance, surely no one spilled it out?), Then they had time to take out their wealth. Where did they take him? To England, which they chose as an instrument of revenge on France for … the destruction of their branch - the Order of the Knights Templar. That's even how! Therefore, when the Hundred Years War began in 1337, all the money ended up there. Hence all the military successes of the British. After all, England at that time, compared to France, was a poor country, and suddenly such military achievements and successes? What "shishi", one wonders? But what - for the "Templar gold"!
Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady on Mount Zion.
The English gold "Noble" at the beginning of the Hundred Years War played no less role than the arrows of the famous English archers. With the help of gold, the British managed to buy the location of the Gascon and Bordeaux knighthood, bribe the municipalities of many French cities, which voluntarily came under the "arm" of the English monarch; well, and only gold paid for the services of numerous "white" and "free" detachments of archers, who brought glory to England in the battles of Cressy and Poitiers.
Thus, the revenge of the Order of Zion was completely successful for him. Well, and the origin of gold, which suddenly appeared among the British, they say, still puzzles historians today …
Great Seal of Edward III.
But it was impossible to openly transfer the hidden gold to the English king. After all, there was a papal bull, and one could run into excommunication. After all, not only Philip, but also the papal nuncios carefully watched whether a mass of gold of unknown origin would emerge anywhere in Europe.
Gold Noble of Edward III, 1369-1377 Bode Museum, Berlin.
King Edward I, too, did not want to be branded as a money-grubber of other people's wealth, and what can be done here? How to “launder” the hidden gold? The authors claim that the method was proposed by the Grand Master of the Zion Order, Guillaume de Gisor, who was fond of … alchemy. In the oldest treatises on alchemy, and they are the Leiden papyri, which belong to the III-VII centuries, we are talking about various secrets of crafts, but nothing more. There is not a single word about the so-called transmutation of metals. There is no about her in the manuscripts of the subsequent time. But on the other hand, from the beginning of the XIV century, for some reason, all alchemists began to write about the transformation of metals into gold. This theme dominates in "research", and the authors claim that they know why this madness became so widespread and reached the 18th century, and in Italy it even went to the 19th.
Like, at the beginning of the XIV century, the famous Raymond Llull, commissioned by the English king Edward I, produced 25 tons (!) Of pure gold! Coins were minted from it, and analyzes proved that Lully's gold was indeed real …
Lully's official biography is one, but in reality she is different! Unless he was stoned to death in Africa, indeed. In reality, he never did alchemy. But he had a recognized scientific authority both among the scholastics and among the theologians of the then Europe.
Quarter Noble Edward III, 1361-1369 Bode Museum, Berlin.
Perhaps Llull was himself a member of the Order of Zion, which is why he often traveled from country to country, as well as the strange motto inscribed on his portraits: "My light is God himself" and … on the banner that fluttered over the last fortress of the Templars on Middle East. And then Lull was initiated into intrigue. Like, gold is already in England, and it is only necessary to create the appearance that he made it through alchemical technologies. When the deception became true, his mission was completed. He left London in 1307, and Edward I died the same year.
Ruins of Corfe Castle in Dorset, where the deposed Edward II was held for some time.
With Edward II "Ziontsy" did not have business - he would have given all the gold to the Dispenser family for unnatural joys, but gave it to his son Edward III, who started the Hundred Years War. Further, the English authors write that the "priors of Zion" and the schism of the church arranged, and one of the ideologues of Protestantism - Zwingli - was also a member of their order. The Hussites, they say, also appeared for a reason, and the entire Renaissance in Italy is also the work of their hands. The Grand Master of the mysterious Order of Zion were such famous people as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton himself, and then Joachim Jungius (1587-1654), the founder of the "Society of Alchemists".
As a result, the Order of Zion has survived to our time. Today it is something like a club organization that has set itself the goal of restoring the Merovingian dynasty on the French throne (that's how it is!), Which was suppressed in the VIII century (it was not me who came up with it, this is G. Lincoln, R. Lee and M. Baigent write). So here it is - one of the world's "backstage".
Gold Noble Edward III 1344 Diameter 33 mm.
P. S. Well, and I would like to finish this story about the secrets of the Templar gold on the following note, or rather, an explanation of why a book by these authors was chosen from the entire abundance of literature on this topic. The fact is that, well, suddenly on the TOPWAR website there will be either a writer or a person who considers himself such and … this is a ready topic for a furious historical novel. Recently, the editor of a large publishing house explained to me how to write books for the modern reader. It is necessary that our man, a rocking paratrooper, for example, get through a "hole in time" into … Ancient Rome! There he beats everyone with his pound fists, sleeps with Cleopatra, and then comes back. And all this is 10 author's sheets (1 sheet - 40,000 characters). And here everything is right on this order: the guard of the Russian embassy in Paris falls into a "hole in time" and ends up in France just on the eve of all these long-standing events. His appearance sees the brother of the Order of Zion, well, and … "takes it into action." Naturally, there were fights, the love of the golden-haired and blue-eyed Frenchwoman, and then through the same "hole" he returns with her, and the gold … part of the gold he walled up in the wall of one abbey and in the 21st century calmly takes it out of the wall! Ready, as you can see, the plot, and even how exciting! I would have taken it myself, but I am so overloaded with work, so who is interested - go ahead!
