MEDIEVAL knights hid and secretly venerated the Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican revealed yesterday, in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic's missing years.
MEDIEVAL knights hid and secretly venerated the Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican revealed yesterday, in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic's missing years.
The Knights Templar, a crusading order suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a bearded man with long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to the Vatican researchers.
The material, kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as Christ's burial shroud, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative.
Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the shroud disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not emerge again until the middle of the 14th century. Writing in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, Dr Frale said the shroud's fate in those years always puzzled historians.
However, her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which a young Frenchman, Arnaut Sabbatier, who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to "a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access". There he was shown "a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man" and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times
Dr Frale said the Knights Templar had rescued the shroud to ensure it did not fall into the hands of heretical groups such as the Cathars, who claimed Christ did not have a human body, only the "appearance" of a man. She said her discovery vindicated a theory first put forward by
Ian Wilson, a British writer, in 1978.
The Knights Templar were founded at the time of the first Crusade in the 11th century to protect Christians making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The order was endorsed by the Pope, but when Acre fell in 1291 and the Crusaders lost their hold on the Holy Land, their support faded amid growing envy of their property and banking wealth.
Rumours about the order's corrupt and arcane secret ceremonies claimed novices had to deny Christ three times, spit on the cross, strip naked and kiss their superior on the buttocks, navel and lips, and submit to sodomy. King Philip IV of France, who coveted the order's wealth and owed it money, arrested its leaders and put pressure on Pope Clement V to dissolve it. Several knights, including the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, were burnt at the stake.
In 2003, Dr Frale, the Vatican's medieval specialist, unearthed the Chinon Parchment, the record of the trial of the Knights Templar, after realising it had been catalogued wrongly. It showed that Pope Clement V had accepted the Templars were guilty of "grave sins", such as corruption and sexual immorality, but not of heresy. Their initiation ceremony involved spitting on the cross to brace them for having to do so if captured by Muslim forces, Dr Frale said.
After the sack of Constantinople, the shroud was next seen at Lirey in France in 1353, when it was displayed in a church by descendants of Geoffroy de Charney, a Templar Knight burnt at the stake. It was moved to various European cities until it was acquired by the Savoy dynasty in Turin in the 16th century. The shroud, Holy See property since 1983, was last exhibited publicly in 2000, and is to go on show again next year.
The self-proclaimed heirs of the Knights Templar in Spain and Britain have asked the Vatican to "restore the reputation" of the order and acknowledge the confiscation of its assets when it was dissolved by Clement in 1307.
The Times
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