Ferguson raised an eyebrow. “That’s cleared it up.”
“Major Ferguson,” De Molay leant forward in his chair, his expression sombre. “You must understand, we’re not accustomed to speaking openly. It’s something of a rarity for us to explain who we are to outsiders.”
“Our Order has been hunted and persecuted down the centuries,” Saxby continued, “for more reasons than I care to think of. So we live in the shadows, and are not very practised at emerging into the daylight.”
De Molay stretched his arm over the table and picked up the chain and seal matrix again. He paused before continuing, touching them thoughtfully, his voice tinged with an air of nostalgia. “Once, a long time ago, we held our heads high across Christendom. We moved in the uppermost circles of influence, the right-hand of kings and popes. We wove the very fabric of power in a way that few have done before or since. With our monks’ hoods and mailed fists, we ruled the land and sea, the royal courts and papal curia. Our citadels dominated every great Christian town—from Jerez to Jerusalem. The Order’s blood red cross was a symbol of might that has rarely been rivalled.”
He gazed distractedly into the middle distance. “But if there’s one constant thing in life, it’s change. So when our Order came to a sudden and brutal end, we retreated from the open light of day, and moved into the shadows.”
He was running the heavy chain through his fingers as if it was an outsize rosary. “But the truth is—we never went away.”
Ava felt a shiver shoot down her spine. She was struggling to take on board what she was hearing. She knew De Molay and Saxby could only be talking about one Order—the seal was unmistakeable, unique. And the historical description De Molay had just given fitted perfectly.
She glanced at both men. “Why should we believe you? You know as well as I do there are thousands of fantasists out there who claim to be that Order, and they are all certifiably mad.”
“Is someone going to tell me what you’re all talking about?” Ferguson interjected. “Which Order?”
“Tell him then.” Ava gazed at Saxby, the gentle light glinting off his silver hair.
Saxby seemed at something of a loss. He glanced at De Molay.
“Well then I will.” Ava continued, turning to Ferguson. “They’re claiming to be the Knights Templar, for two centuries the heroes of Christendom, the medieval Church’s elite military unit. The knights who won their bloody spurs in the crusades, then turned their victories into a business empire with riches to rival kings.”
“The knights you said first found the Menorah in Jerusalem?” Ferguson asked Saxby.
The older man nodded.
“But after two centuries as Christendom’s most skilled soldiers, bankers, and advisers to kings and popes,” Saxby continued, “they were brought down by the king of France in a storm of scandalous accusations—black magic, idol worship, secret ceremonies, blasphemy, and homosexuality.”
Ferguson’s eyes widened. “Was there any truth in them?”
“The charges were politically motivated,” De Molay countered. “King Philip of France was ambitious but bankrupt. He coveted the power of the pope and the wealth of the Templars. He calculated that if he destroyed the pope’s most powerful Order, he would be seen as stronger than the pope. At the same time, he figured he would get his hands on the Templars’ money, which he needed to fill his barren coffers and fund his wars. It was win-win for him.”
“But,” De Molay continued, “he also knew that if he wanted to bring the popular knights down, he first needed to turn public opinion against them. So he ordered his lawyers to fabricate the usual slew of medieval accusations—each guaranteed to appal the God-fearing public. He knew exactly which buttons of public opinion to press, as he had recently thrown the exact same slanders against his last enemy, Pope Boniface VIII. In fact, he was largely responsible for Pope Boniface’s death, after which he arranged a posthumous trial to accuse the dead pope of heresy, idolatry, black magic, and sodomy. Having seen the power of the charges on that occasion, he then hurled the same ones confidently at the Templars. And he faced no resistance from the new pope, Clement V, who sat quietly on the sidelines.”
“That doesn’t make much sense.” Ferguson frowned. “If the Templars were such a rich and influential Order within the Church, why would the pope hang them out to dry?”
“Corruption,” De Molay answered simply and sadly. “Once King Philip had rid himself of Pope Boniface, he rigged the election of a weak Frenchman to replace him as pope.” De Molay shrugged. “The new pope, Clement V, owed King Philip everything. The king had given him the pope’s Triple Crown, and he could take it away just as easily.”
“Without any protection from the Vatican, the knights were brutally tortured for seven years in Philip’s dungeons, forced to confess all sorts of terrible things. But eventually the Order’s seventy-year-old Grand Master could no longer stand the public shame. Despite the terrible tortures, he began a passionate defence of the Order, definitively denying all charges, and giving his broken knights the strength to withdraw their blood-soaked confessions and assert their innocence.”
De Molay turned to Ferguson. “As you may know, in medieval times, withdrawing a confession of heresy was effectively suicide. The knights knew they would no longer be treated as penitents undergoing spiritual rehabilitation. Instead, they would be classified as relapsed heretics, fallen back into their previous errors. Having spared their lives once, the Church would not do it again. Instead, it would send them to the pyre, to cleanse their corrupted souls with fire.”
“Nevertheless, even knowing the terrible consequences, many of the knights followed their leader, withdrew their forced confessions, and willingly chose death to clear their names and consciences.”
“But that’s not the end of it.” Ava continued. “Even though the pope shut down the Templars, and all its members were either burned at the stake, imprisoned for life, or pensioned off into other Orders, there have ever since been rumours the Templars secretly survived as one of the most powerful clandestine societies in history.”
She turned to De Molay. “Something like that?”
The old man nodded his assent.
“You do know how absurd this all sounds?” Ava replied slowly. “The idea that the Order survived? Only the most ardent conspiracy theorists believe it. All the experts confirm the Templars ceased to exist in 1312, officially shut down for all time by the pope. It’s pure fantasy to believe the knights still exist, perpetuating some secret mission.”
“And yet,” De Molay answered wistfully. “Here we are.”
Saxby spread his hands in a gesture of openness. “Dr Curzon, you already have the most convincing piece of evidence.”
That was news to Ava. She wracked her brains to see if there was something she had missed, but she was not aware she had yet heard or seen anything conclusive.
Saxby nodded in the direction of the head of the Foundation. “Does the name De Molay not mean anything to you?”
As Saxby spoke the words, it was as if she was hearing the name for the first time. She had not registered it properly back at the Royal Society—her mind had been on other things
But now, in the current context, her brain made the connection immediately. “But that’s—” she began, before being interrupted by Ferguson.
“Does someone want to tell me what you’re all talking about?”
“The last Grand Master of the Templars,” she explained to Ferguson, “the one who was burned at the stake. His name was Jacques de Molay.”
De Molay cut in. “Along with Hugh de Payns, who founded the Order two hundred years earlier, Jacques de Molay is the most famous of all our Grand Masters. He was a war hero, then later the man who led the knights to the pyre and into history’s pages.”
Ferguson raised his eyebrows. “A war hero? In the crusades? From what I hear, it was butchery. There’s nothing heroic about that.”
De Molay settled back into his chair, shaking his head. “The Templars were no butchers. They did not exist at the time of the carnage when Jerusalem was captured. And there are no records that they ever committed any atrocities. Quite to the contrary.”
He paused. “Jacques de Molay was an old man when he was burned. The doomed last stand of the crusaders had been twenty-three years earlier, at Acre in Palestine. Jacques fought there—and was one of the few survivors.”
“I’ve been there,” Ava murmured. “You can still feel the drama among the ruins.”
“The fall of Acre was the stuff of legend,” De Molay continued. “And it tells you something very important about our Order’s values.”
De Molay stroked the chain, letting it run through his fingers as if he was in prayer. “It was 1291, nearly two hundred years after the Christians first took Jerusalem, and a hundred years after Saladin had seized it back again—a century in which the crusaders had been pushed further and further towards the sea. Now, of all the great Christian cities in the crusader states, only Acre remained. If it fell, the crusades would be over.”
“The Muslim forces were ranged under Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil and his Mamluks—brutal hardened soldiers, quite unlike anything the crusaders had ever seen before, and a far cry from the genteel chivalry of Saladin a century earlier. The Mamluks had been crushing the crusaders in battle after battle, and the outcome of the siege of Acre was never in doubt. The Muslims had vastly overwhelming numbers, and it was merely a question of how and when the end would come.”
“The Stalingrad of the crusades,” Ferguson muttered.
“Something like that,” De Molay acknowledged. “It didn’t take the sultan’s troops long to smash into Acre. Soon they had control of most of the city, and the inhabitants were massacred or taken into slavery. Only the Templars’ compound held out, filled with the Order’s knights and terrified civilians seeking protection and shelter. The sultan offered safe passage to all civilians if the Templars surrendered their tower. Grand Master William de Beaujeu had already died in the fighting, so a senior Templar named Peter de Severy went to the sultan’s camp to negotiate the handover and save the civilians. He knew it would mean the almost certain execution of all Templars, but he did it to save the civilians.”
“The deal was agreed. But once the Templars opened the gates of their tower, the incoming attackers immediately began violating the women and boys. Appalled, the Templars slammed the gates closed and killed the sultan’s men who had so blatantly reneged on the agreement. Knowing the end was near, they heroically loaded the petrified civilians onto the Orders’ boats and dispatched them to nearby Cyprus. Everyone else had already fled—even the King of Jerusalem and the cowardly Master of the Hospitallers.”
“Now the Templars stood alone. The sultan sent a message to the Templars that he wanted to apologise in person to Peter de Severy for the barbarous behaviour of his men. So de Severy again went to the sultan’s camp with a few trusted knights, only to be pushed to his knees and beheaded in full sight of his men watching from Acre’s battlements.”
“The end came fast. Alone and hopelessly outnumbered, the Templars turned to face the full force and anger of the sultan’s crushing army. They fought valiantly, but it was over quickly. My ancestor, Jacques de Molay, was one of the very few to survive. When the bedraggled remnants of the Order regrouped in Cyprus, he was voted in as the new Grand Master.”
“So that was the end of the crusades?” Ferguson shook his head, deep in thought. “Another disastrous Middle-Eastern adventure by Western powers.”
De Molay nodded. “Yet the Templars had always been different. They were born in the East. Many spoke Arabic. When they lived in the Temple—the converted al-Aqsa mosque on the site of King Solomon’s Temple—there are Arabic records proving they let Muslim friends in to pray there. The knights represented something very different from the average blood-soaked crusader.”
He paused. “Nevertheless, after the massacre at Acre, the remaining Templars looked about, and realized the world had changed. No one was interested in Jerusalem or crusading any more. It was the dawn of the 1300s. The Church was evolving. Europe had other priorities. It was now time for the Renaissance and the Medici, for explorers like Marco Polo and writers like Dante and Chaucer—a world of fresh ideas and new dawns. It had no interest in crusaders with their outdated vision of a Christian Palestine guarded by knights and castles.”
“What happened?” Ava could see Ferguson was fascinated. Echoes of his own experiences, she imagined.
“Grand Master Jacques de Molay set about finding a role for the Templars in this new world. It’s clear he struggled, but then in 1307 the king of France launched his crushing attack on the Order, and everything changed. The rest you know.”
“So where do all the stories of magic and treasure come from?” Ava asked.
De Molay smiled. “There had long been rumours the Templars discovered treasures in Jerusalem. Some said it was gold. Others claimed it was an explosive secret relating to Jesus or the Bible—something the Church could not afford to be made public, so the Vatican paid the Templars off in return for their silence. Yet others said it was secret esoteric knowledge learned from eastern mystics. Whatever it was, people whispered that the Order had secret riches and unnatural powers. And Jacques de Molay’s death only proved it.”
“What was magical about his death?” Ferguson looked bemused.
“De Molay’s last words as the flames caught him,” Saxby answered, “were to challenge the pope and the king to meet him in heaven so God could judge which of them was truly guilty.”
“And,” Ava continued, “both pope and king were dead within the year. So, the legend of Jacques de Molay became destined for immortality—the man who summoned a pope and a king to divine judgement beyond the grave.”
There was silence as they all digested the story, before De Molay spoke again. “To some, my ancestor is an icon of resistance against tyrannical oppression.” He smiled. “A high-profile victim of a political trial. To others he is one of Europe’s great mystical figures—a sorcerer and magician who died fighting to protect arcane secrets.”