The Sign and the Seal. A quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant

The name 'Prester John', I discovered, had been completely unknown before the twelfth century a century during which European Crusaders had occupied the Holy City of Jerusalem for a continuous period of more than eighty years (they were finally expelled by the Saracens in 1187). Historians agreed that the very first mention of Prester John had been made roughly half-way through this period in 1145 in the Chronicle of Bishop Otto of Freisingen. Claiming that his informant was a Syrian churchman, the bishop had written of a certain 'John, king and priest [rex a sacerdos] , a Christian who lived in 'the uttermost East' where he commanded enormous armies which, apparently, he wished to put at the disposal of the defenders of Jerusalem. This 'Prester John for so he was wont to be styled' was said to be so rich that he used a sceptre of solid emerald.(39) Subsequently, in 1165, a letter purporting to have been written by Prester John himself and addressed to 'various Christian kings, especially to the Emperor Manuel of Constantinople and the Roman Emperor Frederick',(40) was circulated widely in Europe. Filled with the most preposterous, legendary and supernatural claims, this lengthy epistle stated, inter alia, that the Prester's realm was divided into four parts 'for there are so many Indias'.(41) The next development came in 1177 when Pope Alexander III (writing from Venice) addressed a letter to his 'dearest son in Christ, John, illustrious and magnificent King of the Indians'.(42) Although the Pope certainly believed that he was replying to the author of the 1165 letter he made it clear that he had also had information about 'the Prester' from another source. He spoke, for example, of his personal physician, 'the leech Philip', who had apparently been approached in Jerusalem by the Prester's emissaries. Significantly these emissaries, who were referred to as 'honourable persons of the monarch's kingdom', had expressed their ruler's desire to be granted something that had not even been mentioned in the 1165 letter a sanctuary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.(43) Responding to this request, the Pope commented:

The more nobly and magnanimously thou conductest thyself, and the less thou vauntest of thy wealth and power, the more readily shall we regard thy wish as to the concession of [an altar] in the Church of the Lord's Sepulchre at Jerusalem.(44)

There was much that was puzzling in these twelfth-century documents. But the one thing that was clear from all of them was that Prester John, in his earliest incarnations, had been explicitly associated with 'India'. As I looked more deeply into the whole issue I was able to confirm that this was indeed the case: again and again 'the Prester's' realms were referred to as India or, more loosely, 'the Indies'. It was quite obvious, however, that none of the medieval authorities concerned had had any firm idea in their own minds as to where exactly India and/or the Indies were. And it was equally obvious, when they talked about 'India', that they were only rarely speaking of the subcontinent itself. The majority of the references were quite clearly to some other place, perhaps in Africa, perhaps elsewhere although nobody really seemed to know. As I researched the subject further I began to understand what the source of all this uncertainty might have been: for more than a thousand years before the earliest mention of Prester John a profound terminological muddle had existed in which 'India' had frequently been confused with 'Ethiopia'. Indeed from the first century BC (when Virgil had written of the Nile rising in 'India'), until at least the time of Marco Polo when all the countries that bordered on the Indian Ocean were still referred to as 'the Indies'(45) the terms 'Ethiopia' and 'India' appeared to have been used as though they were completely interchangeable. The classic example of this lay in the works of Rufinius, the fourth-century Byzantine theologian who had compiled the definitive account of Ethiopia's conversion to Christianity that I had studied in 1983.(46) The details of this important treatise (which included place names such as Axum and historically recognized figures such as Frumentius and King Ezana) confirmed beyond all doubt that the country Rufinius had talked about had indeed been Ethiopia; nevertheless he had referred to it throughout as 'India'.(47) This had happened, as one historian explained, because 'the early geographers had always regarded Ethiopia as the western part of the great empire of lndia'.(48) Moreover, it seemed that this same geographical mistake, coupled with the curious letters that had circulated in the twelfth century, had helped to create the impression that Prester John was an Asiatic, indeed an Indian, king. This impression, though erroneous, had proved so tenacious that it was still in evidence long after 'the Prester' had ceased to be a mythical figure and long after his realms had been firmly located in the Horn of Africa. In the late thirteenth century, for example, Marco Polo provided some insight into the conventional wisdom of his era when he wrote that 'Abyssinia is a large province and is called middle or second India. The ruler of this country is a Christian.'(49) Similarly, in the fourteenth century, the Florentine traveller Simone Sigoli was still speaking of 'Presto Giovanni' as a monarch dwelling in India; this 'India', however, was a land which bordered on the dominions of the Sultan of Egypt and its king was described as being the 'master of the Nile', the flow of which into Egypt he was believed to be able to control.(50) Rather later, when the first official Portuguese embassy was sent to Ethiopia in the sixteenth century, its members believed that they were going to meet 'the Prester John of the Indies'. The authorised account of this mission was subsequently written by Father Francisco Alvarez, who disembarked at the Red Sea port of Massawa in April 1520 and then spent the next six years travelling overland around Ethiopia. Despite this arduous physical tour of what was unmistakably part of the African mainland, the title of his work continued to reflect the old terminological confusion: 'Verdadera Informacam das tetras do Preste Joan: das Indicts' ('Truthful information about the countries of the Prester John of the Indies').(51) Throughout his scholarly and informative book, Alvarez always referred to the Emperor of Ethiopia as 'the Prester' or as Prester John'.(52) I was also able to establish that much earlier than this in 1352 the Franciscan Giovanni de Marignolli, apostolic legate in Asia, had spoken (in his Chronica) of 'Ethiopia where the negroes are and which is called the land of Prester John'.(53) Similarly in 1328 a certain Friar Jordanus Catalani had referred to the Emperor of the Ethiopians 'quern vos vocatis Prestre Fohan'.(54) And, later, in 1459, Fra Mauro's well regarded map of the then known world indicated a great city within the boundaries of present-day Ethiopia with the rubric: 'Qui ii Preste janni fa residentia principal.'(55) Surveying all the conflicting references before me I felt literally dazed: sometimes, it seemed, Prester John had been unambiguously located in Ethiopia; on other occasions he had been located in Ethiopia but spoken of as the ruler of the 'Indies': and sometimes he had been located in India itself or elsewhere in the far east. Behind all this confusion, however, there seemed to be no doubt that the real Prester John, the source of all the myth-making, must all along have been the ruler of Ethiopia the only non-European Christian kingdom that had existed anywhere in the world in medieval times, and therefore the only model that Wolfram could possibly have drawn on when he had talked of an 'India' being ruled by Prester John', the Christian son of Fierfiz and Rapanse de Schoye. For a final and hopefully definitive word I turned to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which observed:

It is not improbable that from a very early date the title Prester John' was assigned to the Abyssinian king, though for a time this identification was overshadowed by the prevalence of the Asiatic legend. At the bottom of the double allocation there was, no doubt, that confusion of Ethiopia with India which is as old as Virgil or perhaps older.(56) Significantly for my purposes, the Encyclopaedia concluded its entry with a reference to the exchange of letters between the Pope and Prester John that, as noted earlier, had taken place in the second half of the twelfth century:

However vague may have been the ideas of Pope Alexander III respecting the geographical position of the potentate whom he addressed from Venice in 1177, the only real person to whom the letter can have been sent was the king of Abyssinia. Let it be observed that the 'honourable persons of the monarch's kingdom' whom the leech Philip had met with in the East must have been the representatives of some real power, and not of a phantom. It must have been a real king who professed to desire . . . the assignation of . . . an altar at Jerusalem. Moreover we know that the Ethiopic Church did long possess a chapel and altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. (57)

Indeed so. In fact, as I was soon able to ascertain, the chapel and the altar had first been granted to Ethiopia in the year 1189 and not by the Pope (who by then was no longer in a position to distribute such favours) but by the Muslim general Saladin who had wrested Jerusalem from the hands of the Crusaders in 1187. Most important of all, these special privileges in the Holy Sepulchre had been obtained for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as a result of a direct appeal to Saladin by no lesser person than the King of Ethiopia himself.(58) These events had taken place just a decade before unknown stonemasons in northern France had left enigmatic representations of the Holy Grail, of the Ark of the Covenant, and of an Ethiopian Queen of Sheba in the north porch of Chartres cathedral and also just a decade before Wolfram von Eschenbach had begun to write his Parzival. It seemed to me, moreover, that such coincidences were unlikely to be just coincidences. On the contrary, I now felt that the circumstantial evidence very strongly supported my hypothesis that the Chartres sculptures and Wolfram's remarkable narrative poem had been explicitly created to serve as esoteric treasure maps. And, though not actually marked with an 'X', there seemed to be little doubt that the spot identified by these maps as the hiding place of the treasure could only be Ethiopia the land of Prester John, the land that had provided the last resting place of the fictional Holy Grail, and thus (if my theory was correct) the land in which the Ark of the Covenant, the real object that the Grail symbolized, would be found. Now, however, other questions presented themselves:

How, in the late twelfth century, could information that the Ark might rest in Ethiopia possibly have reached a German poet and a group of French iconographers? What connected the former to the latter? for they must have been connected in some way if they had both produced works of art encoding the same message. Finally, why should anyone have chosen to express the secret of the Ark's location in a story and in sculptures? I had already concluded that this might have been done to ensure transmission of the secret to future generations. At the same time, however, the code used particularly by Wolfram had been exceptionally difficult to crack. I myself, with all the research resources of the twentieth century at my disposal, had only got as far as I had because I had been to Axum and had thus been predisposed to accept that the Ark might be in Ethiopia. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, that advantage should not have been available to anyone. From this it followed that the hidden message of Parzival could not have been decoded in the medieval period at all unless there had been people with access to some very special and privileged knowledge. Since there would have been no point in creating a code that no one could crack, it seemed to me logical to assume that such people must have existed. But who could they have been?

I did find one group of Europeans who fitted the bill perfectly. As part of the Crusading army of occupation they had maintained a massive presence in Jerusalem in the twelfth century: they had been there in 1145 when the Prester John legends had first begun to circulate, and they had still been there in 1177 when envoys of the King of Ethiopia had visited the Holy City seeking an altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Direct contact between Ethiopians and members of this European group would therefore have been perfectly possible. The group in question was, moreover, highly secretive and made regular use of codes and ciphers in its far-flung international communications. It was, in addition, a group that had been involved with the evolution and dissemination of Gothic architecture in Europe (and quite specifically with the architecture and iconography of Chartres cathedral). Finally, and most importantly, it was a group that Wolfram von Eschenbach had several times mentioned by name a name that I had also come across in connection with the curious Grail cup that the sculptors of the north porch of Chartres cathedral had placed in the left hand of their imposing statue of the priest-king Melchizedek(59) (which, incidentally, was almost the only depiction of Melchizedek in the whole of medieval Europe).(60) What then was the name of this strangely influential, powerful and widely travelled group? Its full and formal title was the 'Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon'61 but its members were better known simply as 'Templars', or as Knights Templar. It was, fundamentally, a religious order, an order of warrior monks, and throughout much of the twelfth century it had its headquarters in Jerusalem on the site of Solomon's Temple the same site from which the Ark of the Covenant had inexplicably vanished in Old Testament times.

CHAPTER 5 WHITE KNIGHTS, DARK CONTINENT

According to Emma Jung, analyst, lecturer and wife of the eminent psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, the way in which the literary genre of the Holy Grail appeared at the end of the twelfth century was both sudden and surprising. In an authoritative study of the Grail legend (which she undertook on behalf of the Jung Foundation) she argued that something of great significance must have lain behind this abrupt and dramatic materialization. Indeed she went so far as to suggest that in Chr en de Troyes's Conte du Graal and Wolfram's Parzival the first two exemplars of the genre it was almost 'as if a subterranean watercourse had been tapped'.(1) What might that 'subterranean watercourse' have been? The answer, I thought, lay in the period of history in which the Grail romances began to circulate. This, after all, was the era of the Crusades an era that had brought Europeans into close contact with Arab and Judaic culture for the first time and that saw the occupation of Jerusalem by Christian armies for eighty-eight years (from AD 1099 until the recapture of the Holy City by Saladin in 1187). It was in 1182 the eighty-third year of the occupation that Chr en produced his version of the Grail story. And shortly after the fall of Jerusalem Wolfram von Eschenbach started work on his own Parzival. I therefore found it difficult to resist the conclusion that these early recensions of the Grail romance must have been based on something that had happened or on material that had come to light during the period that Jerusalem had been under the full control of European forces. I looked very carefully at the text of Parzival to see whether there was any evidence to support this go Holy Ark and Holy Grail conjecture and discovered that Wolfram had on several occasions made mention of a mysterious source named 'Kyot' a man, he said, whom he had relied upon heavily for his information and who fortunately had been:

a baptized Christian otherwise this tale would still be unknown. No infidel art would avail us to reveal the nature of the Gral and how one came to know its secrets.(2)

This was by no means the only place in Parzival where the German poet had hinted that there might have been more to his Grail than at first met the eye. I was already satisfied that this 'something more' could well have been the Ark of the Covenant the real object that lay behind the beautiful fictional symbol. Now as I studied the widely scattered references to 'Kyot' it occurred to me that this shadowy figure, whose identity was never clarified, could have been the source who had introduced Wolfram to the secret of the Ark's hiding place in Ethiopia. Referred to at one point as 'Kyot, who sent us the authentic tale',(3) he was clearly very important. But who was he? There were few obvious clues in Parzival itself. Here Kyot was spoken of as a 'Master'(4) and there it was suggested that his mother tongue had been French.(5) But beyond such hints there was very little to go on. I therefore turned to the literary scholars and found that several of them had identified Kyot quite specifically with a twelfth-century French poet, Guyot de Provins, who had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem shortly before the recapture of the Holy City by the Saracens(6) and who had also been attached for a while to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.(7) This latter fact caught my eye because I knew that Frederick like Wolfram had been a German by birth (before his election as Emperor in 1152 he had been Duke of Swabia(8). And I also knew (see previous chapter) that this same Frederick had been one of the two monarchs specifically named amongst the various Christian kings to whom the 'letter of Prester John' had been addressed in the year 1165. Investigating further I then learned something else something that turned out to be of major importance: Guyot/Kyot had been closely associated with the Knights Templar(9) who, according to Emma Jung's study, 'were considered to be the guardians of Solomon's Temple.'(10) I also knew that it was from Solomon's Temple that the Ark of the Covenant had mysteriously disappeared in Old Testament times. I was therefore excited to discover that, in Parzival, Wolfram had described the guardians of the Grail as 'Templars'(11) and had referred to them, flatteringly, as:

a noble Brotherhood . . . who, by force of arms, have warded off men from every land, with the result that the Gral has been revealed only to those who have been summoned to Munsalvaesche to join the Gral Company.(12)

Were Wolfram's 'Templars' the same as the famous military order of that name? I found that the word translated into English as 'Templars' had, in the Middle High German of Parzival, been Templeis.(13) Amongst the scholars there was some debate about what exactly had been meant by this. The consensus, however, was that the term was 'an obvious variant of the regular forms templarius, templier, Eng. Templar'(14) and that Wolfram's 'Order of Knighthood dedicated to the service of the Gral' could therefore be 'identified with the order of the Knights Templar'.(15) I then remembered that one of the guidebooks I had used on my visit to Chartres cathedral had spoken of 'Wolfram von Eschenbach, who is said to have been a Templar though there is no proof of this'.(16) On further investigation I was able to establish that there had indeed been persistent rumours to this effect.(17) I also learned that several well respected scholars had suggested that the German poet might himself have paid a visit to the Holy Land whilst writing Parzival.(18)

DIGGING FOR HIDDEN TREASURE?

I had been intrigued by Emma Jung's assertion that the Templars in Wolfram's time 'were considered to be the guardians of Solomon's Temple'. I had not understood why this should have been so. However, when I began to research the order, I discovered that it had derived its official title ('The Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon') from the fact that its Jerusalem headquarters had been located on the summit of Mount Moriah where Solomon's Temple had stood until its destruction by the Babylonians in 587 BC. That Temple had been built in the tenth century BC and its explicit indeed its only purpose had been to serve, as the Bible put it, as 'an house of rest for the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord'.(19) By identifying themselves with Solomon's Temple, therefore, it seemed to me that there was a very real sense in which the knights had also identified themselves with the Ark of the Covenant. And my feeling that this was so strengthened as I began to investigate the curious history of the order. The Templars, I learned, had been founded by nine French noblemen who had made their way to the Holy Land in AD 1119 twenty years after Jerusalem had been captured and occupied by the European powers. The twelfth-century historian, Archbishop William of Tyre, noted that 'foremost and most distinguished' amongst these nine men 'were the venerable Hugh de Payens and Godfrey de St Omer.'(20) On checking further I discovered something interesting. Hugh de Payens, who was in fact the first Grand Master of the Order,(21) had been born in the village of Payens, eight miles north of the city of Troyes in the old French county of Champagne.(22) Moreover it seemed that the nine founders were all from the same region.(23) In this there were several coincidences:

1 Chartres, with its great cathedral, had in both the twelfth and thirteenth centuries been a dominion of the Counts of Champagne.(24) 2 One of the original nine knights, Anar e Montbard (who later became the fifth Grand Master), was an uncle of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux(25) who was himself a native of Champagne. This enormously influential cleric had taken a special interest both in Gothic architecture and in the Grail romances.(26) 3 The city of Troyes, so close to the birthplace of Hugh de Payens, the first Templar Grand Master, was also the home of Chr en de Troyes, the 'inventor' of the Holy Grail. 4 Hugh de Payens was a cousin of the Count of Champagne,(27) and, in the year 1125, the Count of Champagne joined the Templars.(28) 5 When Chr en de Troyes rose to prominence rather later in the twelfth century his principal patron was the Countess of Champagne.(29)

Noting this string of coincidences with some interest, I went on to learn more about the early history of the Templars. There was much that was strange. Perhaps strangest of all, however, was the way in which the nine original knights were received by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem in 1119. As soon as they had arrived in the Holy City they told him that they wanted to establish their headquarters on the Temple Mount(30) where the monarch had recently converted the Al-Aqsa Mosque to serve as his own royal palace. Rather astonishingly he complied at once with their request, giving them, for their exclusive use, a large part of the former mosque and its outbuildings immediately adjacent to the famous 'Dome of the Rock', which marked the site where Solomon's Temple had once stood.(31) Thereafter, like latter-day archaeologists with an important dig to complete, the knights lived, ate, slept and worked on this uniquely precious site: indeed for almost seven years after their arrival they rarely left it and adamantly refused admission to any outside party. In public pronouncements they had declared that their mission in the Holy Land was to 'to keep the road from the coast to Jerusalem free from bandits'.(32) I could find no evidence, however, to suggest that they took any steps to fulfil this mission during those first seven years of their existence; on the contrary, as one authority put it, 'the new Order apparently did very little' in this period.(33) Besides, simple logic suggested that nine men could hardly have protected anybody on a highway almost fifty miles long and their number stayed at nine until they were joined by the Count of Champagne in 1125. Moreover, the members of an older and far larger military order the Knights of Saint John were already doing the job of protecting pilgrims when the Templars arrived.(34) I could only conclude, therefore, that Hugh de Payens and his colleagues must have had some other, undeclared, purpose. As noted above, they largely confined themselves to the precincts of the Temple Mount during the first seven years of their sojourn in Jerusalem and this suggested very strongly that their real motive must have had to do with that very special site. From the beginning their behaviour was secretive and I found, as a result, that there was no really hard evidence about what they had been up to there. It seemed at least possible, however, that they might have been looking for something, and this suspicion deepened when I learned that they had indeed used their occupancy of the Temple Mount to conduct quite extensive excavations. Because the Temple Mount today contains the third and fourth most sacred sites of Islam the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque modern archaeologists have never been permitted to work there. In recent years, however, Israeli teams have operated freely immediately to the south of the Mount, and there they found the exit-point of a tunnel which they identified as having being dug by the Templars in the twelfth century.(35) In their official report the archaeologists stated:

The tunnel leads inward for a distance of about thirty metres from the southern wall before being blocked by pieces of stone and debris. We know that it continues further, but we had made it a hard-and-fast rule not to excavate within the bounds of the Temple Mount, which is currently under Moslem jurisdiction, without first acquiring the permission of the appropriate Moslem authorities. In this case they permitted us only to measure and photograph the exposed section of the tunnel, not to conduct an excavation of any kind. Upon concluding this work . . . we sealed up the tunnel's exit with stones.(36)