An Object That Postdates Its Guardians
The Bureau’s Levantine desk has been in correspondence since Michaelmas with a gentleman who withholds his name and offers a shelfmark in its place. The shelfmark, on enquiry, belongs to no archive in Europe. His claim has not varied across eleven letters: that from the first decade of their existence until the morning of their arrest, the Knights Templar held in trust a vessel that stood in two places at once; that it stood in one place only for as long as a brother was looking at it; and that the Rule, the secrecy, the seal and in the end the pyre all follow from the labour of keeping men from looking.
Two difficulties present themselves before any of the evidence does, and this office sets them down first, in the interest of an orderly file.
The first is that the Grail had not yet been thought of. It enters the record as literature, at a datable moment, in the wrong language and the wrong century. Chrétien de Troyes began Perceval, or the Story of the Grail somewhere between 1182 and 1190, dedicated it to Philip, Count of Flanders, carried it to some nine thousand lines of octosyllabic couplets and then stopped, leaving it unfinished in the middle of an adventure of Gawain’s. The object in it is a graal: a broad serving dish, carried through a hall by a young woman. Chrétien does not call it holy. He gives the bleeding lance in the same procession equal billing. The order our correspondent describes was founded around 1119. On his own account, then, it is a house raised to guard a thing that nobody would trouble to write down for another sixty years.
The second difficulty is the vocabulary. The behaviour attributed to the vessel — two positions at once, reduced to one by the act of looking — belongs to a body of physics that begins with Planck in 1900 and is not assembled until the middle of the 1920s. The word itself, Quantenmechanik, is Göttingen’s, coined there in the early 1920s and standing in the title of a Born and Jordan paper of September 1925. Heisenberg’s matrices are of that same year, Schrödinger’s wave equation of the first half of 1926, Born’s probabilistic reading of the wave function of 1926, and the uncertainty relation of 1927. Our correspondent’s knights are therefore conducting, in the second decade of the twelfth century, a technical argument that Europe did not arrive at until the reign of George V.
It is not this office’s business to decide which of the two difficulties is fatal. It is this office’s business to print the claim in one column and the record in the other, and to keep the columns straight.
The Order As the Record Has It
The documented order needs no assistance from anybody. It was founded about 1119 by Hugues de Payens and a company of some nine knights in all, and its stated business was the safety of pilgrims on the roads to Jerusalem. In 1120 the king of Jerusalem gave the company quarters on the Temple Mount, in a wing of the royal palace lodged in the al-Aqsa Mosque, which the crusaders had decided was the Temple of Solomon. The order took its name from the address and has never entirely escaped it.
Nine or ten years later, at the Council of Troyes in 1129, it received the endorsement of the western church and a rule of its own — the Latin Rule, seventy-two clauses of it, drafted the year before and entered in the council’s minutes. Bernard of Clairvaux is generally credited with a hand in the drafting, and afterwards wrote the Templars a treatise in praise of the new knighthood whose burden is that a monk who kills is not on that account a homicide. Ten years after that, the bull Omne datum optimum of 1139 placed the order outside every jurisdiction but the pope’s, allowed it to cross any border it pleased, and allowed it to keep whatever it took.
What followed was not chiefly military. At its height the order counted perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand men, of whom about one in ten was a knight; the remainder kept the farms, the mills, the fleets and, above all, the accounts. A traveller might deposit at one house and draw at another, which is a bank, and the Templars were running one across two continents in the twelfth century.
None of this required a vessel. That is the Bureau’s difficulty with the vessel. The order’s rise is fully accounted for by a papal exemption, a shipping interest and sound bookkeeping, and explanations of that shape have never yet held an audience.
The Seal, and the Reading Placed Upon It
The order’s seal shows two knights riding a single horse. It is, by a comfortable margin, the most over-read object in medieval Europe.
The conventional interpretation is the dull one, and it is also the correct one. The device advertised poverty: two men, one mount, no second horse, saying in wax what the founding vow said in Latin. The order hung it from its charters for the better part of two centuries and meant nothing further by it.
Our correspondent reads it otherwise. On his account the second rider is not a second man but the same man in his other position, and the seal is accordingly a technical diagram of the vessel’s condition, pressed into wax and published on every instrument the order issued, in plain sight, for two hundred years, on the principle that nothing is so thoroughly concealed as a thing printed. He observes, correctly, that the device never shows a second horse. He does not observe that a second horse would have cost money, which is the entire point of the picture.
The Chapter Rule Concerning Looking
The rule, as it reaches this office, was read aloud four times a year and ran to one sentence: that the vessel was to be guarded and not seen. It was kept in the treasury of the Paris Temple, beneath a cloth, in a casket which was itself beneath a cloth. The brother of the vigil stood his watch with a linen band tied over his eyes and was relieved before matins. A brother who looked was not punished, there being held to be nothing left to punish: he had already done the damage. The vessel, once seen, was thereafter in one place only, and stayed in one place until a full year had passed in which nobody had looked at it at all.
The Bureau observes that this is a coherent doctrine and that it is roughly seven centuries early. Thomas Young told the Royal Society in 1801, publishing the following year, that light admitted through two small apertures lays down alternating bands of light and dark on anything beyond them. The demonstration was repeated with electrons by Claus Jönsson in 1961 and, in 1974, by Merli, Missiroli and Pozzi, who sent them through one at a time and watched the pattern assemble itself out of individual arrivals; readers of a physics monthly voted that version the most beautiful experiment in the discipline in 2002. Put a detector at the apertures and the bands go.
Our correspondent regards this as vindication. The Bureau regards it as a near miss, for a reason he has never answered. What destroys the pattern is not attention but information: the fringes do not care whether anyone is in the room, only whether the room has kept a record of which way the light went. A blindfolded brother standing all night over a covered casket is, on the modern account, exactly as ruinous as a brother staring at it, provided only that the casket has some means of knowing he was there. That distinction is not one a twelfth-century chapter could have put into words. It is also, on our correspondent’s own showing, the precise distinction his brothers spent two hundred years getting wrong.
The Claim Beside the Record
A claim of this kind is best examined by being set out next to the documents, in adjacent columns, and then left alone.
The exercise is not flattering to our correspondent. It is not altogether flattering to the record either. The record has no vessel; it also has no wholly satisfying account of why a bank with a private army was taken apart in a single morning by a king who owed it money. The Bureau notes the asymmetry and declines to draw anything from it.
The Claim Beside the Record
What our correspondent reports of the vessel, set against what the charters, bulls and trial records contain.
| Reported of the vessel | On the documentary record | |
|---|---|---|
| The object | A vessel standing in two places until it is looked at | No vessel of any kind in charter, rule or trial record |
| First written trace | Claimed from about 1119, in a book not produced | A graal first appears in a French romance of 1182 to 1190 |
| What it looks like | A cup, and simultaneously another cup | A broad serving dish carried by a young woman; not called holy |
| Who guards it | A blindfolded vigil in the Paris treasury | Knights of an order invented by a German poet about 1205 |
| The seal | A diagram of the doubled state, published as camouflage | Two knights on one horse: a statement of poverty |
| Vocabulary used | Position, observation, collapse | Terms of 1900 to 1927; Quantenmechanik coined at Göttingen in the 1920s |
| Why the order fell | The secret, which the king of France wanted | Arrests of 13 October 1307; dissolved by Vox in excelso, 22 March 1312 |
| Templar joined to Grail | At the founding, and the reason for it | First asserted in the nineteenth century; popularised in 1982 |
| Surviving document | One shelfmark, belonging to no archive | The Chinon Parchment: Vatican D 217 and D 218 |
Nine rows, and the left-hand column is furnished throughout by a single unnamed source while the right draws on charters, bulls, trial transcripts and a parchment in the Vatican. He has read the table. He replies that an empty column is precisely what one would expect.
Friday the Thirteenth, and the Parchment at Chinon
On Friday 13 October 1307 the officers of Philip IV opened sealed orders across France and took every Templar they could find, in one morning, before the order knew the orders existed. The charges were of a familiar shape: denial of Christ, spitting on the cross, obscene kisses at profession, and the worship of an idol described variously as a cat and as a bearded head. No idol was ever produced.
Confessions followed in France, where torture was used freely, and did not follow where it was not. In England, where it was rarely applied, the brothers at first admitted nothing whatever. Seventy-six were tried on Cyprus and acquitted. The kings of Portugal and Aragon found no fault of heresy, blasphemy or immorality in their own men. Fifty-four brothers were burned outside Paris in May 1310, two days after the archbishop of Sens took the trial over from the papal commission. The trials are among the clearer demonstrations in European law of what torture reliably produces, which is confessions.
Then there is the parchment at Chinon. Between 17 and 20 August 1308, in a castle on the Vienne, three cardinals — Bérenger Frédol, Étienne de Suisy and Landolfo Brancacci — examined five of the order’s leaders, taking Jacques de Molay on the twentieth. The document they drew up records that each man confessed, asked pardon, and was absolved on Clement V’s authority and restored to the sacraments. That the absolution happened has never been news: a second Chinon parchment, the cardinals’ own letter reporting it to Philip IV, was in print by 1693 and again by 1751. What was missing was the record of the questioning itself, and in September 2001 the palaeographer Barbara Frale came upon it in the Vatican Apostolic Archive, where the original carries the number D 217 and the authenticated copy D 218. A facsimile was published on 25 October 2007 in Processus contra Templarios, in seven hundred and ninety-nine numbered copies, with one further copy presented to the pope.
The end itself came by administration rather than by verdict. Vox in excelso, dated 22 March 1312, dissolved the order without condemning it. The Council of Vienne had taken the view that nothing gathered so far was sufficient to convict, so the suppression was carried not at law but by apostolic provision: the reputation was past repair, and the order was abolished on that ground by irrevocable decree. Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney went to the fire in March 1314 — on the eighteenth, or on the eleventh, according to which historian is asked — having withdrawn their confessions in public first.
Our correspondent is very taken with the parchment, and this office concedes he has earned the paragraph. Here, he writes, is a document that was a conviction and an acquittal at the same moment, and that remained in both conditions for six hundred and ninety-three years, on the sole ground that nobody opened the box. Nobody had to open the box. The cardinals’ letter saying what was in it had been on a printed page since 1693. What is left, when that is subtracted, is an argument about filing.
The Grail Arrives Seventy Years Late
The dates will not be moved, and the dates are the whole of the matter.
Chrétien writes his procession — a lance that bleeds, a pair of candlesticks, a girl with a broad dish — somewhere between 1182 and 1190, and never says what the dish is. Robert de Boron, writing between 1191 and 1202, is the man who makes it holy: in his Joseph d’Arimathie the vessel becomes the cup of the Last Supper, carried afterwards to the cross to catch the blood. That is where the adjective comes from, and it arrives roughly eighty years after the order was founded.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, between about 1200 and 1210, disagrees with everybody. His Grail is not a cup at all but a stone, kept at a castle he calls Munsalvæsche, entrusted to a hereditary line beginning with Titurel and defended by an order of knights of his own devising. This is the earliest moment at which anything Templar-shaped stands beside anything Grail-shaped, and the Bureau observes that at that moment both shapes are made of paper.
There is no historical evidence linking the Templars to a search for the Grail. Not a charter, not a bull, not a line of testimony from proceedings in which men were asked, under torture, to name every object they had ever kept in a box. The association is a modern manufacture. It is first asserted in the early nineteenth century, elaborated steadily thereafter, and reaches its familiar form in 1982 with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which historians class as pseudohistory and which is nonetheless the ancestor of very nearly every Templar Grail now in circulation.
The Bureau wrote to its correspondent a final time and asked, as it always asks, for the shelfmark. The reply came by return. The vessel, he writes, is in the treasury at Paris and also in Jerusalem; the Bureau is welcome to inspect it at either address; and he asks only that we do not look.
Plates: the Closing of the Chapter
Three plates from the correspondent's file, printed by the Bureau without endorsement.
