True story behind Da Vinci Code riddle and remarkable discovery in UK graveyard
As flames leapt for the condemned man lashed to a stake, in his agony he stretched his mouth wide and began to bellow.
The date was March 18, 1314 and Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar was being burnt alive in front of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, condemned on trumped-up charges of heresy. They had been concocted to serve the interests of a grasping French king on his uppers and his Pope.
Yet what emerged from De Molay’s mouth as he burned was no anguished scream. What he roared was a Christian curse. A promise to take Pope Clement V and King Philip IV, his accusers and executioners, with him to the grave within one calendar year. And that’s exactly what would come to pass.
Curse or coincidence, the subsequent deaths of pope and king started an obsession that gripped the people – and still grips us 700 years on. We can see it in the excitement that greeted news this week that eight 800-year-old graves belonging to members of the Templars – full name The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon – had been discovered in a graveyard in Enville, Staffs.
The Templar graves (Bev Holder / Stourbridge News / SWNS)Today, Templars live on and still loom large in our culture, in books and film, yet it could all have been so different. The Knights Templar was a military order of the Catholic faith formed in about 1119 to protect pilgrims making the dangerous journey to the Holy Land and falling prey to bandits and highwaymen.
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Author and historian Jem Duducu says: “During the Crusader Time in the Middle East, you get this concept of the Military Orders. “A monk is a celibate man who takes a vow of poverty and chastity, who lives in a community together and prays every day. Military Orders were exactly the same thing. But rather than praying for God, he’s fighting for God.”
The first and third group of Military Orders still exist, the Hospitallers and Teutonic Knight. But everyone talks about the one that doesn’t. The reason, Jem says, is the persecution of the Templars that began in 1307 as the Crusades were over. Suddenly the question of why they existed began to be asked, by a certain royal at least.
Jem explains: “The thing is, in 1307 Philip IV of France was flat broke. If a king’s broke and there is this useless institution… well two and two adds up to well I’m going to get rid of them and nick all their cash and lands which is exactly what happened.” The Templars had themselves come up with modern banking.
Philip IV was called ‘The Fair’ (Corbis via Getty Images)
The graves in Staffordshire (Bev Holder / Stourbridge News / SWNS)“They invented the cheque,” he explains. “If you are going on a crusade, it’s going to be a really long way. So what you’d do, you’d go to your local Templar location and you might give them a pound weight of silver and then they’d give you a cheque or note saying we owe you a pound of silver.
“You could then go to Jerusalem without having to carry a pound of silver across the whole of Europe… hand in your cheque and they give you the silver.” But that prowess with money was to be their undoing as King Philip eyed their wealth and decided to get rid of them.
Charges were levelled that during Templar admissions ceremonies, recruits were forced to spit on the Cross, deny Christ and engage in indecent kissing among other things. Our idea of Friday the 13th as an unlucky day, Jem says, “is because Philip IV sealed orders to basically arrest all of the Knights Templar in France. These sealed orders were opened on Friday 13, 1307.”
The trials went on for five years. Then you get the last of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, burnt at the stake with a couple of other high-ranking members. Jem says the execution was greeted by a host of people who are there to see it. He adds: “You burn heretics, by the way, you don’t burn witches, the idea being that if you are a heretic you can’t possibly go to heaven but if we burn you maybe the smoke rises to heaven. It was weirdly a sort of act of kindness.”
The Da Vinci Code (© 2006 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Jem Duducu’s book Deus Vult: A Concise History of the Crusades is out now, Amberley Publishing. His podcast Condensed Histories is also availableJacques didn’t see it that way. “He cried out to both the Pope and Philip. He says, ‘I summon you to heaven before the year is out!’” Jem explains. “Now the Pope was old but Philip was actually killed in a hunting accident.” A hitman? “Probably not,” says Jem. “But if you have a man who has been clearly unjustly executed saying you will die before the year is out and then you do, it kind of looks like God’s on your side.
“And also a complete coincidence, but while this Pope was being laid in state, the chapel he was in was hit by lightning. And it looked like divine intervention.” As de Molay and his compatriots were being burned, the crowd had rushed forward to gather up the ashes like a holy relic. This didn’t usually happen, Jem says.
“It’s a sign that even in the Middle Ages with their low standards of justice, they knew that these guys were set up and what they did was die in a very martyr like way.” They were heroic, too, holding the last citadel in the last Middle Eastern city, Acre, for several weeks despite the Muslims outnumbering them by 12,000 to 200.
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“If you want a shining knight, a Templar’s a pretty good thing to go for,” Jem says. Is such courage the real reason for our fascination with a long dead Order of men? “The Templars are over. But there is a hole there and what this leads to is rumours and whispers and then you get The Da Vinci Code. A conspiracy hole people just keep pouring stuff into and it sells books.”
He pauses, smiles. “Why I love the Da Vinci Code is there was one summer when everybody’s reading the book and going to see the film and the general chit chat wasn’t about football or something like that… it was about the Crusades.”
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