Templar treasure

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The Templar treasure is a legendary treasure of the Knights Templar , which has not yet been found. According to legend, it was hidden in Gisors in 1307 . However, there are also references to other hiding places in particular Rennes-le-Château , the Rosslyn Chapel (Scotland) and the Money Pit ( "money pit") of Oak Iceland (Nova Scotia) .

General

Paw cross of the Knights Templar

The best known of the possible hiding places is Gisors. Gisors Castle is part of the small town, 72 km northwest of Paris . It was in the administration of the Templar Order between 1158 and 1161. In the Middle Ages, this was an internationally active militia , which rose to become an elite force and the richest military organization with the symbol of the red paw cross . Templars were the only Christians allowed to lend money against interest. They owned lands and gold, they were considered rich.

Prehistory of the treasure

The war heavily indebted King Philip IV ("the beautiful") and Pope Clemens V jointly planned the destruction of the Knights Templar in October 1307 in order to divide up its vast wealth of gold and lands. For the purpose of a large-scale arrest operation, the king had used the pretext that the Templars were responsible for alleged moral misconduct and heresy . In a letter dated September 14, 1307 he ordered the arrest of the Templars. The arrest began on the morning of October 13, 1307 in Paris with the arrest of 138 Templars. Inside the city there was a fortified complex - Temple - in which the militia searched in vain for the gold treasure. Of the estimated 2,000 Templars across France, 546 (including 138 in Paris) were captured. The General Visitor (Grand Master) Jacques de Molay also lived in the fortified complex . The bull " Pastoralis praeeminentiae " published by Pope Clement V on November 22, 1307 once again confirms the arrest of the Templars throughout Europe and their expropriation. The wave of arrests led to the destruction of most of the documents by fire, so that much historically significant evidence is no longer available. After the arrest, there were Templar trials and interrogations ( Inquisition ), including by the Pope and his cardinals in Poitiers .

The Templar treasure

It has been proven that, in addition to the lands, the Templar treasure consisted of gold coins, gold-decorated furniture and mortgage bonds. However, only a very small part of the mobile treasures was seized during the wave of arrests.

During the interrogations in June 1308, the Templar Jean de Châlon stated that Hugues de Châlons and Gérard de Villers had taken the treasure of the French major visitator , Hugues de Pairaud , from the Paris Temple on October 12, 1307 (i.e. the evening before the wave of arrests) Sea with 50 horses. They had set sail on 18 ships with an unknown destination. Based on an imaginative interpretation of Gisors' name, Gerard de Sède came to the conclusion that the three carts mentioned in his version, which he thought were too small for a cargo of 18 ships, were a reference to Gisors Castle. Gisors (Roman "Gisacum") is located directly on the former Roman road from Paris and on the Epte , which flows into the Seine .

Search for the treasure

The apparently first search for the lost Templar treasure began in Canada . The treasure hunt in Gisors followed, which was followed by research.

Canada

In the summer of 1795, the Canadian lumberjacks Daniel McGinnis, Anthony Vaughn and John Smith rowed to Oak Island, 200 m from the coast, only 1,200 meters long, 800 meters wide and 57 hectares in Mahone Bay on the south coast of Nova Scotia . Days before, McGinnis had discovered a depression in a small clearing on the uninhabited island that indicated human activity. The Templar treasure suspected here was never found from 1804, despite the deployment of 30 rescue companies. However, the activities have not been stopped; Excavations are permitted by the "Oak Island Treasure Act" since January 2011 against a license.

Scotland

The well-preserved Roslyn Chapel is located in the small town of Roslin near Edinburgh and is one of the real Templar churches. Excavations by the hobby researcher Niven Sinclair in April 1992 had to be ended prematurely due to the risk of collapse, but had not revealed any evidence of an extensive Templar treasure. His cousin Andrew Sinclair wrote the book The Sword and the Grail on the connection between the chapel and the Templars , and in 1998 he published the book Discovery of the Grail ("Discovery of the Grail ") . The year it was built in 1456 speaks against the chapel as a hiding place; So at the time of the wave of arrests in 1307 it was not yet usable as a hiding place.

France

The from Gisors originating Roger Lhomoy (born April 17, 1904, † 1974) was since 1929 Château de Gisors Castellan and gardener and had heard of its history. He began his own nightly excavation attempts in the spring of 1941 and at the end of April 1944 came across a brick wall after collecting 50 tons of rubble. Behind it was a 30 m long and 9 m wide hall with statues of Christ and the Apostles, in which 19 stone sarcophagi and 30 chests with valuable objects were hidden. In March 1946 he reported his discovery to the mayor. Because of the danger of collapse, he had the excavation hole closed by German prisoners of war and released his gardener. Undeterred, Lhomoy asked the Minister of Education for permission, which was given to him; but the approval of the castle owner, the local mayor, was refused. The dismissed and impoverished Lhomoy had Gérard de Sède, an editor at the news agency Agence France-Presse , employ him as a groom on his estate in 1959 .

Researches

Gérard de Sède (born June 5, 1921, † May 29, 2004) was interested in Lhomoy's excavations and began his own research. He relied on alleged documents in the secret archives of the Vatican, which contained 72 statements by Templars, which were made during the interrogations by Pope Clement. According to this, Gérard de Villers and Hugues de Châlons and 40 armed soldiers carried away the General Visitor's treasure on three carts the day before the wave of arrests, i.e. on October 12, 1307. De Sède suspects that it would have been too risky to transport the three carts along the old Roman road to what is now the Eure department , which is why they would have been deposited in Gisors.

Amateur historian de Sède published the book Les Templiers sont parmi nous, ou L'Enigme de Gisors ("The Templars Are Among Us or The Riddle of Gisors") in 1962 , which he wrote with the assistance of the opaque Pierre Plantard . Here he tries to scientifically substantiate this thesis. “There are old documents that exactly match Lhomoys information.” The book de Sèdes becomes a bestseller in France and triggers a wave of amateurs excavations in Gisors, so that Minister of Education André Malraux starts professional excavations on February 10, 1964. However, since these threaten the statics of the castle, the castle of Gisors was declared a military area on March 12, 1964. In his book Le trésor maudit de Rennes-Le-Château (“The Cursed Treasure of Rennes-Le-Château”), published in 1967, de Sède finally focused on the last, as yet unexplored place of the never-found Templar treasure. Here there was an underground structure built by the Templar Grand Master Bertrand de Blanquefort (or Blanchefort ) between 1156 and 1158 and located in the area of ​​the Château de Blanchefort, which was laid out by German miners. It could have served as a hiding place for the Templar treasure, because from here it was not far to the heavily fortified Templar port of Collioure . The Château de Blanchefort was destroyed in 1210 during the crusade against the Cathars .

Inferences

When the Templars were persecuted, they were expropriated and their documents destroyed. Therefore there are no primary documents about the treasure and its whereabouts. Posterity is dependent on speculation and has concentrated on three locations in locating the alleged Templar treasure. Except for Canada - where professional searches have been conducted for over 200 years - the excavations were either carried out by amateurs (Rosslyn) and / or too short and imprecise (Gisors). A visible part of the Templar treasure were the extensive lands, some of which were transferred to the Order of St. John after expropriation . It is undisputed that the Templars also had mobile assets, which, however, have not yet been found.

Alain Demurger, on the other hand, comments on the relatively small amount of money found among the Templars in France (even the property registers found in the religious houses did not reveal much wealth, and the headquarters of the order was in Cyprus ), with the fact that the king was probably like many had exaggerated illusions about the wealth of the Order. However, he was able to use the current income from the Templar possessions for himself and received 200,000 pounds from the settlement with the hospital knights who took over the Templars' possessions. Demurger is skeptical of the rumors about a Templar treasure that had been stashed away before the arrest, as otherwise they were obviously surprised by the arrests.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gisors belonged to Margaret of France , who was married to Henry the Younger . The Templars were tasked with managing the castle during the couple's youth.
  2. ↑ Tobias Daniel Wabbel , The Templar Treasure - A Search for Traces , Gütersloher Verlagshaus 2010, p. 31.
  3. ↑ Tobias Daniel Wabbel, The Templar Treasure - A Search for Traces , Gütersloher Verlagshaus 2010, p. 8.
  4. ↑ le tresor des templiers a Gisors? Recording of a report on TF1 about the myth of the Templar treasure in Gisors (French)
  5. ↑ Bernd FWS Prinz de Mistra, Uncomfortable Truths , 2011, p. 168 f.
  6. ↑ Alain Demurger, Die Templer, Aufstieg und Untergang , 2004, p. 246.
  7. ↑ Malcolm Barber, The Templar Trial , 2008, p. 232 f.
  8. ↑ Tobias Daniel Wabbel, The Templar Treasure - A Search for Traces , Gütersloher Verlagshaus 2010, p. 76.
  9. ↑ The passage can be found in Heinrich Finke Papsttum und Untergang des Templerordens , Münster 1907, Volume 2, p. 339: Item dixit, quod potentes ordinis prescientes istam confusionem fugiunt et ipse obviavit fratri Girardo de Villariis ducenti quinquaginta equos, et audivit dici, quos intravit mare cum XVIII galeis, et frater Hugo Cabilone fugiit cum toto thesauro fratris Hugonis de Peraudo .
  10. ^ Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe, The Oak Island Mystery , 1996, p. 19.
  11. ↑ Nikolaus C. Heutger, The Templars once and now , 2007, p. 46.
  12. ↑ Lynn Picknett / Clive Prince, The Sion Revelation , 2006, p. 115.
  13. ↑ FRANCE / TEMPLAR TREASURE: Discovered by the groom . In: Der Spiegel . No.  48 , 1962, pp. 114 ff . ( Online - Nov. 28, 1962 ).
  14. ↑ Marc Krueger, Preis der Gerechtigkeit , 2000, p. 167.
  15. ↑ Tobias Daniel Wabbel, The Templar Treasure - A Search for Traces , Gütersloher Verlagshaus 2010, p. 55.
  16. ↑ Wilfried Augustin, The Secret of Rennes-Le-Château ( Memento of August 24, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), in: EFODON-SYNESIS 2/2006, p. 9 ff. (PDF; 867 kB)
  17. ↑ Die Templer , Beck, 1991, p. 275