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

'THOSE TREACHEROUS TEMPLARS . . .'

The first breakthrough came when I received an English translation of the full text of the letter supposedly written by Prester John himself to various Christian kings in the year 1165. Unlike Pope Alexander III's letter to Prester John, written in 1177 (which was a genuine document intended, as I now knew, for Lalibela's half-brother Harbay) the 1165 letter was regarded with great suspicion by scholars. Its date was authentic, but it was thought most unlikely that it could have been written by anyone with a real claim to the title Prester John' and it was therefore regarded as an elaborate hoax.(91) As I read it I could understand why. If the writer was to be believed his 'realms' contained, amongst other things: 'wild hares as big as sheep'; 'birds called griffins who can easily carry an ox or a horse into their nest'; 'horned men who have but one eye in front and three or four in the back'; 'other men who have hoofed legs like horses'; 'bowmen who from the waist up are men, but whose lower part is that of a horse'; the fountain of youth; a 'sandy sea' from which 'every piece of debris . . . turns into precious stones'; 'the tree of life'; 'seven-headed dragons' and so on and so forth.(92) Just about every mythical beast and object ever dreamed of, it seemed, was to be found in the land of Prester John. Where exactly this land was located, however, was nowhere specified in the letter except in the loose reference to the 'many Indias' quoted in the previous chapter (a reference, as I now knew, that was more likely to have applied to Ethiopia than to the subcontinent). Moreover, scattered here and there amongst the fabulous creatures were other animals that did seem to belong to the real world: 'elephants' and 'dromedaries', for example, and also 'unicorns' with 'a single horn in front' which sounded very much like rhinoceroses all the more so since, apparently, they were sometimes known to 'kill lions'.(93) Such details made me wonder whether the writer of the letter might have been something more than a hoaxer might, in fact, have had direct knowledge of Ethiopia (where, of course, camels, elephants, lions and rhinos were all to be found). My suspicion that this might have been so deepened when I noticed that mention was also made of 'King Alexander of Macedonia' in a context that linked him to 'Gog and Magog'.(94) This caught my eye because I remembered that Alexander, Gog and Magog had been connected in an almost identical manner in a very ancient Ethiopic manuscript known as the Lefafa Sedek, the 'Bandlet of Righteousness',(95) which was supposedly unknown outside Abyssinia until the nineteenth century. Another point of interest was that 'Prester John' claimed in the letter that his Christian kingdom contained large numbers of Jews who seemed to be semi-autonomous and with whom wars were often fought. Again this had a certain flavour of genuine Ethiopian conditions: following the tenth-century Jewish uprising by Gudit (which had temporarily overthrown the Solomonic dynasty) there had in fact been several hundred years of conflict between Ethiopia's Jews and Christians.(96) All in all, therefore, despite the many fantastic and obviously apocryphal aspects of the letter, I was not disposed to believe that it was entirely an imposture. It seemed to me, furthermore, that its prime objective might have been to impress and scare the European powers to whom it was addressed. In this regard I noted in particular the frequent references that it made to the size of 'the Prester's' armed forces for example:

We have . . . forty-two castles, which are the strongest and most beautiful in the world, and many men to defend them, to wit ten thousand knights, six thousand crossbowmen, fifteen thousand archers, and forty thousand troopers . . . Whenever we go to war . . . know that in front of us there march forty thousand clerics and an equal number of knights. Then come two hundred thousand men on foot, not counting the wagons with provisions, and the elephants and camels which carry arms and ammunition.(97)

This was unmistakably fighting talk, but what was most notable about it was that it was closely tied to something else specific, and hostile, mention of the Templars. In a section apparently intended for the 'King of France' the letter suggested:

There are Frenchmen among you, of your lineage and from your retinue, who hold with the Saracens. You confide in them and trust in them that they should and will help you, but they are false and treacherous . . . may you be brave and of great courage and, pray, do not forget to put to death those treacherous Templars.(98)

Reviewing this ominous suggestion in the context of the rest of the bizarre letter I asked myself a question: in the year 1165, which candidate for the role of 'Prester John' could possibly have had a motive (a) to try to frighten off the European powers in general by boasting of his own overwhelming military strength, and (b) to attempt to smear the Knights Templar in particular and to request that they should be 'put to death'? The answer I came up with was Harbay, who, in 1165, had been the reigning Zagwe monarch of Ethiopia, and who, as I have already observed, had certainly been the intended recipient of the letter written to Prester John by Pope Alexander III in 1177. One of my reasons for pinpointing Harbay as the real author of the supposedly hoax letter of 1165 was terminological. I had discovered, as my research had progressed, that all the Zagwe monarchs had favoured the use of the Ethiopic term Fan in their string of titles(99) Derived from Fano, a reddish-purple toga worn only by royalty, the word meant 'King' or 'Majesty' and might easily have been confused with 'John'; indeed it could have been precisely because of this (coupled with the fact that several of the Zagwe rulers were also priests) that the phrase 'Prester John' had first been coined. But there was a stronger reason to suspect Harbay. He, after all, had been a man with a burgeoning political problem in the year 1165. By then his disaffected half-brother Lalibela (who was eventually to depose him) had already been in exile in Jerusalem for five years long enough, I speculated, for him to have got to know the Templars and to have made friends amongst them. Perhaps he had even asked the knights to help him to overthrow Harbay and perhaps Harbay had got wind of this plot. Such a scenario, I thought, was not entirely implausible. The slightly later request to the Pope for a concession in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (a request presented in Palestine by 'honourable persons' of 'Prester John's' kingdom) suggested that Harbay regularly sent emissaries to Jerusalem; such emissaries, therefore, could easily have picked up intelligence of a conspiracy brewing between Lalibela and the Templars in 1165. If this had been what had happened then it would undoubtedly go a long way to explain the strangely menacing suggestion to the King of France that it might be a good idea if he were to have the 'treacherous Templars' (still mainly Frenchmen at that time) executed forthwith. The 'letter of Prester John' at least according to this hypothesis would therefore have been concocted by Harbay's agents in Jerusalem as a deliberate strategy to deter collusion between the Templars and Prince Lalibela. This was obviously an attractive line of reasoning. It was also dangerously speculative, however, and I would have been reluctant to follow it any further if I had not found certain passages in Parzival which seemed to confirm that the Templars might indeed have entered into precisely the sort of alliance with Lalibela that Harbay would have feared.

'DEEP INTO AFRICA . . .'

Written some years after Lalibela had forcefully deposed Harbay from the throne of Ethiopia, Parzival contained a number of direct references to the Templars who, as I have already noted, were depicted as being members of 'the Grail Company'.(100) What I found intriguing was the specific suggestion, which Wolfram repeated several times, that these Templars were occasionally sent on missions overseas missions that were highly secretive and that were to do with winning political power. For example:

Writing was seen on the Gral to the effect that any Templar whom God should bestow on a distant people . . . must forbid them to ask his name or lineage, but must help them gain their rights. When such a question is put to him the people there cannot keep him any longer.(101)

Or similarly:

If a land should lose its lord, and its people see the hand of God in it and ask for a new lord from the Gral Company, their prayer is granted . . . God sends the men out in secret.'(102)

This was all very interesting, but the passage that really caught my attention came one page later in a lengthy monologue by a member of the Grail Company who spoke, amongst other things, of riding 'deep into Africa . . . past the Rohas'.(103) Scholars, I discovered, had tentatively identified 'the Rohas' with the Rohitscher Berg in Saangau Styria.'(104) But this derivation looked completely spurious to me: it was not at all suggested by a context that had just mentioned Africa and I was quite unconvinced by the reasons given for it.(105) I knew something, however, that the Wolfram specialists in universities in Germany and England could not have been expected to know: Roha was the old name for a town in the remotest highlands of Ethiopia a town now called Lalibela in honour of the great king who was born there and who made it his capital when he returned to it in triumph in the year of our Lord 1185. Neither was there any reason for the experts in medieval German literature to have been aware that this same Lalibela had spent the previous quarter of a century in Jerusalem rubbing shoulders with the knights of a military-religious order whose headquarters stood on the site of the Temple of Solomon knights who would have had a special interest in any contender to the throne of a country which claimed to possess the lost Ark that the Temple had originally been built to house. The question that I now needed to address, therefore, was this: was there any evidence at all to suggest that Lalibela might have been accompanied by a contingent of Templars when he returned to Ethiopia in 1185 and deposed Harbay? I did not think that the answer to this question would be easy to find. Luckily, however, I had been to the town of Lalibela in 1983 while working on my book for the Ethiopian government, and I had kept field notes. I therefore studied these notes with great care. To my surprise, I almost immediately came across something of interest. On the ceiling of the rock-hewn church of Beta Mariam (yet another place of worship dedicated to Saint Mary the Mother of Christ) I had noticed 'faded red-painted crosses of the Crusader type'. I had then remarked: 'These don't look at all like any of the normal Ethiopian crosses check out origins when back in Addis.' I had even made a rough sketch of one of these 'Crusader crosses' (which had triangular arms widening outwards). And, although I could not remember doing so, I had obviously followed the matter up to some extent: beneath the sketch and in a different pen I had later added the technical term croix patted. What I had not known in 1983 was that the Templars' emblem adopted after the Synod of Troyes had given official recognition to the order in 1128 had been a red croix patt (106) I did know this in 1989, however. Moreover I also knew that the Templars had been associated throughout their history with the construction of wonderful churches. Almost inevitably, further questions began to form in my mind. By a considerable margin, the eleven rock-hewn churches of Lalibela were the most architecturally advanced buildings that Ethiopia had ever known (indeed, in the considered opinion of UNESCO, they deserved to be ranked amongst the wonders of the world).(107) Moreover, a certain air of mystery clung to them: there were other rock-hewn churches in the country, to be sure, but none were even of a remotely comparable standard. Indeed, in terms of overall conception, of workmanship, and of aesthetic expression, the Lalibela monoliths were unique. No expert had been able to suggest exactly how they had been built, and there had been persistent rumours of foreign involvement in their construction. Several academics had speculated that Indians, or Egyptian Copts, had been hired as masons by King Lalibela.(108) Ethiopian legends, by contrast, attributed the work to angels! I now had to ask myself, however, whether the true artificers of the Lalibela churches might not have been the Templars. Certainly, my 1983 field notes painted a picture of a fantastic architectural complex:

Towering edifices [I had written ], the churches remain places of living worship eight hundred years after they were built. It is important to stress, however, that they were not built at all in the conventional sense, but instead were excavated and hewn directly out of the solid red volcanic tuff on which they stand. In consequence, they seem superhuman not only in scale, but also in workmanship and in conception. Close examination is required before the full extent of the achievement that they represent can be appreciated. This is because, like medieval Mysteries, considerable efforts have been made to cloak their real natures: some lie almost completely concealed within deep trenches, while others hide in the open mouths of huge quarried caves. Connecting them all is a complex and bewildering labyrinth of tunnels and narrow passageways with offset crypts, grottoes and galleries a cool, lichen-enshrouded, subterranean world, shaded and damp, silent but for the faint echoes of distant footfalls as priests and deacons go about their timeless business. Four of the churches are completely free-standing, being attached to the surrounding rock only by their bases. Although their individual dimensions and configurations are very different, they all take the form of great hills of stone, precisely sculptured to resemble normal buildings. They are wholly isolated within the deep courtyards excavated around them and the most striking of them is Beta Giorghis (the Church of Saint George). It rests in majestic isolation at a considerable distance from all the others. Standing more than forty feet high in the centre of a deep, almost well-like pit, it has been hewn both externally and internally to resemble a cross. Inside there is a faultless dome over the sanctuary and, throughout, the craftsmanship is superb.

I concluded my 1983 notes from which I have copied only the brief extract above with the following question:

Setting aside the assistance supposedly provided by angels, how exactly were Lalibela's wonders created? Today, if truth be told, no one really knows: the techniques that made possible the excavation and chiselling of stone on so dramatic a scale, and with such perfection, have long been lost in the mists of history.

In the summer of 1989, looking back at what I had written six years previously, I was uncomfortably aware of how little those mists had cleared and of how much there remained for me to find out. Intuitively I had a strong feeling that the Templars could have been involved in the creation of the Lalibela complex. The fact was, however, that there was really nothing to support this view other than the red 'Crusader crosses' that I had observed painted on the ceiling of Saint Mary's (one of the four completely free-standing churches). Nevertheless there was a genuine mystery surrounding the origin of the churches. This mystery was reflected in the inability of scholars to explain how they had been excavated or who their architects could have been. It also found an echo in the quaint insistence of some of the inhabitants of Lalibela that angels had been involved in the work. Now, as I studied my 1983 field notes I discovered that there were other dimensions to the enigma. Inside Saint Mary's, I had recorded, a priest had taken me close to the veiled entrance of the Holy of Holies and there had pointed out a tall pillar. I had described this pillar in the following terms:

About as thick as a good-sized tree-trunk, it soars upwards out of the rock floor and disappears into the gloom above. It is completely wrapped, spiral-fashion, in a very old, discoloured shroud of cloth that bears faint traces of washed-out dyes. The priest says that the pillar is sacred and that engraved upon it are certain writings by King Lalibela himself. Apparently these writings tell the secrets of how the rock-hewn churches were made. I asked if the cloth could be drawn back so that I could read these secrets, but the poor priest was horrified. 'That would be sacrilege,' he told me, 'the covering is never removed.'

Gallingly, my notes had nothing else to add on this point. I had gone on to scribble my little entry on the 'Crusader crosses' and then had left Saint Mary's for the next church in the complex. Closing the battered foolscap jotter that had travelled everywhere with me in 1983, I felt what I can only describe as a sense of retrospective fury at my earlier lack of curiosity. There had been so much in Lalibela that I had failed to investigate. There had been so many questions that I should have asked and had failed to ask. Golden opportunities had thrown themselves wantonly at me from every direction and I had ignored them. Rather wearily I turned my attention to the hefty stack of primary and secondary reference materials that I had accumulated on Ethiopia. The bulk of what I had consisted of photocopies of worthy but irrelevant academic papers. There was, however, one book which looked rather promising. Entitled The Prester John of the Indies, it was an English translation of the narrative of the Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia in 1520 6. Written by Father Francisco Alvarez, this narrative running to more than five hundred pages had first been printed in Lisbon in 1540 and had been rendered into English in 1881 by the ninth Baron Stanley of Alderley. It was Lord Stanley's translation that I had before me in a relatively new edition issued by the Hakluyt Society in 1961. The editors, Professors C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford of the University of London, described Alvarez as 'rarely silly or incredible . . . a kind, tactful, sensible man . . . free from the dishonesty of the traveller who tries to exaggerate his own knowledge.' As a result his book was universally regarded by scholars as being 'of great interest . . . incomparably detailed [and] a very important source for Ethiopian history.'(109) With this glowing testimonial fresh in my mind I turned to page 205 of Volume I, where Alvarez began his account of his own visit to Lalibela. A lengthy church-by-church description followed which I could only admire for its exhaustive detail and for its plain, no-nonsense language. What I found most striking of all was how little things seemed to have changed in the four and a half centuries that had elapsed between Alvarez's visit and my own. Even the covering on the pillar in Saint Mary's had been there! After giving an account of other aspects of that church the Portuguese traveller had added: 'It had besides a high column in the cross of the transept over which is fixed a canopy, the tracery of which looks as if it had been stamped in wax.'(110) Referring to the fact that all the churches were 'entirely excavated in the living rock, very well hewn' Alvarez exclaimed at one point:

I weary of writing more about these buildings, because it seems to me that I shall not be believed if I write more, and because regarding what I have already written they may blame me for untruth. Therefore I swear by God, in whose power I am, that all I have written is the truth, to which nothing has been added, and there is much more than what I have written, and I have left it that they may not tax me with its being falsehood, so great was my desire to make known this splendour to the world.(111)

Like the good reporter he undoubtedly was, Alvarez talked to some of the senior priests at the end of his visit a visit, it is worth remembering, that was made only three and a half centuries after the churches were built. Amazed by everything he had seen, the Portuguese cleric asked his informants if they knew how long the carving and excavation of the monoliths had taken and who had carried out the work. The reply he was given, unencumbered by later superstitions, caused my pulse to race:

They told me that all the work on these churches was done in twenty-four years, and that this is written, and that they were made by white men . . . They say that King Lalibela ordered this to be done.(112)

Coming at the end of everything else I had learned, I felt that I could not disregard this pure and early piece of testimony. To be sure, the history books on my shelves made no mention of any 'white men' going to Ethiopia before the time of Alvarez himself. That, however, did not rule out the possibility that white men had gone white men who had belonged to a military-religious order that was renowned for its international outreach and for its secretiveness; white men who, in the words of Wolfram von Eschenbach, were 'forever averse to questioning';(113) white men who were sometimes sent to 'distant people . . . to . . . help them gain their rights';(114) white men whose headquarters in the twelfth century had stood over the foundations of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. The priests' strange statement about the 'white men' who had come to Lalibela therefore struck me as being a matter of the utmost importance. Above all else, it strengthened my conviction that Wolfram had been indulging in something more than mere whimsy when, in Parsival, he had linked the Templars so closely to his Grail cryptogram and to Ethiopia. He had never, anyway, been a whimsical writer; on the contrary he had been pragmatic, clever and highly focussed. I thus now felt increasingly confident that my suspicions about him were justified and that he had indeed been admitted to the inner circles of a great and terrible mystery the secret of the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Perhaps through the good offices of his 'source', the Templar acolyte Guyot de Provins, or perhaps by means of a more direct contact, he had been commissioned by the order to encrypt that secret in a compelling story that would go on being told and retold for centuries. Why should the Templars have wanted Wolfram to do such a thing? I could think of at least one possible answer. Written down and placed in some form of container (a chest buried in the ground for example), the secret of the Ark's whereabouts might easily have been lost or forgotten within a century or so, and would then only have come to light if somebody physically dug it up again. Cleverly encoded in a popular vehicle such as Parzival, however (which, I discovered, had been translated into almost all modern languages and reprinted in English five times in the 1980s in the Penguin Classics edition alone), the same secret would have stood an excellent chance of being preserved indefinitely in world culture. In this way, through all the passing centuries, it would have continued to be available to those with the capacity to decipher Wolfram's code. It would, in short, have been hidden in full view, enjoyed by all as a 'cracking good yarn', but accessible only to a few initiates, insiders, determined seekers as the treasure map that it really was.

CHAPTER 6 RESOLVING DOUBTS

My visit to Chartres cathedral and my readings of Wolfram's Parzival during the spring and summer of 1989 had opened my eyes to many things that I had missed before notably to the revolutionary possibility that the Knights Templar could have made an expedition to Ethiopia in the twelfth century in search of the lost Ark. As explained in Chapter 5, I did not find it difficult to see how and why they might have been motivated to do that. But what I now needed to establish was this: other than the Templar 'quest' that I thought I had identified, was there really any convincing evidence to suggest that the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant might actually be in the sanctuary chapel at Axum? After all, there were literally hundreds of cities and churches around the world which boasted of possessing holy relics of one kind or another fragments of the True Cross, Christ's shroud, the finger-bone of Saint Sebastian, the lance of Longinus, and so on and so forth. In almost every case where a proper investigation had been conducted such boasts had turned out to be hollow. Why, therefore, should Axum be any different? The fact that its citizens obviously believed their own legends certainly didn't prove anything except, perhaps, that they were a susceptible and superstitious lot. And, on the face of things, there seemed to be several good reasons for concluding that the Ethiopians did not possess the Ark of the Covenant.