‘Yohanan Mamdana,’ Bronson said. ‘John the Baptist.’
‘That’s not proof, of course, but it’s indicative. At least the person who carved that had no doubts about the contents of the box. Now let’s get out of here.’ She closed the wooden doors on the box carefully, leaving it looking exactly the same as when they’d first seen it.
‘I’d forgotten about that phrase you quoted at Khaled,’ Bronson said as they walked out, ‘but it does make sense now. Tibauld de Gaudin, or more likely Jacques de Molay himself, the nobleman who succeeded de Gaudin as the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, must have decided to send the assets of the order in Outremer somewhere completely different. In fact, bearing in mind that pretty soon after de Molay returned to France he probably found out about the plot Philip the Fair was hatching against the order, he would almost certainly have had the wealth concealed in another country altogether.’
‘And you think it’s still there, somewhere, just waiting for somebody to stumble across it?’
‘Knowing the Templars, I doubt very much if anyone will ever stumble across it, as you put it. Wherever it is, I’m certain it’ll be extremely well concealed in a secure location, and it’ll only be found by someone who finds a clue somewhere and follows whatever trail has been left. But, yes, I do think it’s still out there, the massive hoard that represents a significant part of the riches of the order, because there’s never been any suggestion that it’s been found, at any time in history. Maybe we should carry on looking.’
Angela shook her head and gave a small smile.
‘Not me, or not right now, anyway. What I want is something to eat and drink, followed by a good long sleep without worrying if some man with a gun is going to try to kill me while I’m in bed. And then I’ll be quite happy to go back to my office at the British Museum and get stuck into some really dull and boring, but really, really safe work.’
She paused for a moment as a thought struck her.
‘But if you do ever happen to stumble across any kind of clue that might lead you to the treasure of the Templars, just make sure that I’m the first and only person you tell about it. Okay?’
Bronson smiled back at her and nodded.
The café-restaurant a few yards up the road, by the traffic-light controlled junction, was just opening its doors and Angela pointed at it.
‘Coffee and a croissant?’ she asked. ‘It’s probably all they’ll have available at this time of the morning.’
‘Sounds good to me. In fact, that’s the best offer I’ve had in a long time,’ Bronson said. He took her firmly by the hand, and led the way across the street and into the early-morning sunshine.
Author’s note
I’m a novelist by profession, which means I’m a professional liar — my short job description is that I’m paid to make up stuff — but I have always believed that the best fiction has a grounding in fact. It’s far easier to construct a story around real events, though sometimes the truth and the fiction inevitably become somewhat blurred. This short author’s note should help separate the one from the other.
In global religious terms, the Mandaean faith is insignificant, with only perhaps 70,000 followers still remaining worldwide, and until the Iraq war of 2003, the vast majority of them lived in southern Iraq. Today this number has dropped to an estimated 5000 in this region of the country, and it is believed that most of the remainder are now living in Iran and northern Iraq.
The Mandaeans followed a Gnostic religion — just like the Greek word gnosis, the Aramaic word manda translates as ‘knowledge’ — that would undeniably have been regarded as the wildest heresy by the early Christian church. They believed in the reality of many of the Old Testament figures, people like Adam and Noah, and especially revered John the Baptist, while at the same time utterly rejecting Moses, Abraham and particularly Jesus Christ. They spoke a dialect of Eastern Aramaic known as Mandaic, and were probably of Semitic origin.
Bearing in mind that in mediaeval times a person could be labelled a heretic simply for worshipping God and Jesus in a way that was not approved of by the Church, anyone following the Mandaean religion would have been seen to be completely beyond the pale, and it is therefore unsurprising that they have remained one of the most private and secretive of all religious sects. Virtually all the information about them has been obtained by outsiders.
The concept of baptism was, and is, central to their faith and followers of this belief system are more commonly known in the Middle East as the Subba, a name that derives from another Aramaic word that refers to baptism. The place where the Mandaeans worship is known as a mandī, and would normally be built beside a river to facilitate baptism (maṣbattah), though where this was impossible a ritual bath would be constructed inside the mandī.
The description of the formation of the order of the Knights Templar, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (the Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici) is as accurate as the historical record will permit, bearing in mind that the events described took place almost one millennium ago. As far as can be established, the original nine knights were linked by either blood or marriage, and their ostensible purpose in travelling to Jerusalem was to protect the pilgrims on the roads of the Holy Land, a task that would have been manifestly impossible for such a small number of warrior monks, no matter how well trained, fearless and dedicated they might have been.
And, as far as can be gleaned from the historical record, for the first nine years of the existence of the Order, none of the members made the slightest attempt to do anything of the sort. Instead, having somehow managed to persuade King Baldwin II of Jerusalem to grant them accommodation in the lavish quarters of the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount in 1120, they apparently rarely ventured outside. This notable absence from their alleged primary purpose led to any number of subsequent conspiracy theories, and it seems to have been generally accepted that they spent most of their time excavating the ground that lay beneath their feet. A number of Templar relics were later found in the hidden rooms below the Temple Mount, and we know for a fact that they made use of some of the chambers that lay within it, most particularly the large space that became known as Solomon’s Stables, which they used to accommodate their horses.
In those first years, the Order was notably impoverished — indeed, one of the symbols used to represent the poverty of the Knights Templar was the image of two men riding one horse, the implication being that they could not afford a horse each — and relied upon donations to survive.
However, that changed very quickly once the Order was officially recognized and endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church in about 1129, an endorsement that was gained suspiciously rapidly bearing in mind the tiny size of the Templar organization at that time. This endorsement was followed only ten years later by the proclamation of the Omne Datum Optimum papal bull. It exempted the Templars from obeying any local laws, meaning that members of the Order could cross any border into any country, were not required to pay any taxes to anybody, and were subjected only to the authority of the Pope himself.
By any standards, this was an extraordinary piece of legislation, and there appears to have been no particularly obvious reason why it should have been granted by the pontiff. It is therefore not beyond the bounds of possibility that the first members of the Knights Templar did spend years excavating the Temple Mount and in doing so found something, the mere existence of which was sufficient to terrify the Pope into granting whatever the Templars wanted.