Tag: death

KNIGHTFALL: The second episode!

Posted on by Tony McMahon

FROM THE TEMPLAR KNIGHT BLOG

Episode 2: Find us the Grail

So now Knightfall is creating a dramatic and tense conflict between Pope Boniface VIII and William de Nogaret, chief adviser to the king of France. Scroll down and you’ll see the two historical profiles I provided you of these two very real-life characters.

Pope Boniface VIII in Knightfall
Pope Boniface VIII

As I explained in blog posts previously – and do search – De Nogaret was from a family tainted by association with the Cathar heresy. This was a large-scale rebellion in the south of France against the Catholic church led by a Christian sect that rejected the power of Rome’s bishops and priests. In my view, De Nogaret was possibly over-compensating for his family’s treachery towards the French state through being ultra-loyal to the king. But he remained hostile to the church – and especially the pope.

Boniface existed and was reviled by the poet Dante as an utterly corrupt and venal pope. However, in relation to the king of France, he was simply refusing to be his puppet. The king wanted to tax church wealth without seeking Rome’s permission and the Vatican was refusing to comply. This would eventually result in a violent physical conflict between De Nogaret and Boniface – and I wait to see how Knightfall depicts that.

As I suspected, the clash between these two medieval heavyweights has somewhat overshadowed Landry, our Knight Templar hero. But it’s a delicious and spiteful battle to watch! Ostensibly, they are duking it out over a royal marriage but we can sense there are bigger themes underlying this that will eventually lead to the destruction of the Knights Templar – an army of monastic warriors protected by the pope.

This episode flagged up King Philip of France’s hefty debts to the Templars, which we know will provoke their downfall. He’s a monarch always in debt and on the look out for treasure he can grab to balance the books. Meanwhile, the Templars, oblivious to their impending doom, are desperately looking to recover the Holy Grail – which they have carelessly lost. Click on the tab above for more information about the Templars and the Holy Grail.

The Grail plot for now is less compelling than the scheming between De Nogaret and Boniface but it’s clearly going to erupt to the surface as the series progresses. So far – so good. Your thoughts?

Ten accusations made against the Knights Templar

Posted on by Tony McMahon

Templar artworkIn 1307, the Knights Templar were rounded up, imprisoned and tortured under secret orders issued by the King of France. The trials of top Templars would last for years and lead to many being burnt at the stake including the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay. He was incinerated in public in front of Notre Dame cathedral.

A string of scandalous accusations were made against the Knights Templar to justify smashing the order. I recommend Malcom Barber’s detailed account of The Trial of the Templars if you want to learn a lot more.

MolayHere were some of the most noteworthy charges:

  1. New entrants to the Templar order had to deny Christ, the Holy Virgin and the saints
  2. Templars were told that Christ was a false prophet and there was no hope of receiving salvation through belief in him
  3. Knights were ordered to spit on a crucifix and even urinate or trample on it
  4. The order worshipped a head of some description, possibly that of a cat or with three faces or an idol called Baphomet
  5. This idol was encircled with cords, which the Templars then wore around their waists
  6. The Knights Templar rejected the sacraments of the Catholic church
  7. It was thought that the Grand Master and other leading Templars could absolve sins even though they were laymen and not priests
  8. New entrants were kissed on the mouth, the navel, the stomach, the buttocks and the spine and homosexuality was encouraged
  9. The Templars were only interested in financial gain and pocketed donations for their own use
  10. Chapter meetings and initiations were held in strictest secret with only Templars present and those that revealed any details to people outside of the order would be punished with imprisonment or death

A short film from the Smithsonian includes a reenactment of what the alleged initiation ritual looked like.

A medieval knight plays Death at chess

Posted on by Tony McMahon

If you have never seen The Seventh Seal – then watch it. A tortured medieval knight is played by a very young Max von Sydow, who you may have seen in The Minority Report and other movies. In this scene, he plays a game of chess with Death in order to remain alive. It’s a Swedish movie with subtitles but don’t let that put you off.

How to deal with The Walking Dead in the Middle Ages

Posted on by Tony McMahon
Temporarily used for contact details: Historic England, Archive Services, The Engine House, Fire Fly Avenue, Swindon, SN2 2EH, United Kingdom, Tel: 01793 414600, Email: archive@HistoricEngland.org.uk, Website: http://www.HistoricEngland.org.uk
The deserted village of Wharram Percy. Credit: Historic England

New evidence unearthed in England has revealed that medieval villagers in the county of Yorkshire were genuinely terrified of the dead coming back to life. So much so that they mutilated their bones, chopped up bodies and burned them. The University of Southampton and Historic England have just released their findings and it makes gruesome reading.

The bones were found in Wharram Percy, north Yorkshire. They were covered in knife marks and very obvious attempts to break up the skeletal remains. Heads were cut off and thigh bones snapped before being thrown into a bonfire. The bodies were of people aged between four years old and fifty.

From the 11th century onwards, there are writings on so-called ‘revenants’ who would come back from the grave – often wicked people who could not rest at ease after death. Possibly brought back to life by the devil himself, they were believed to be capable of attacking the living.

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Follow Medieval Death Bot on Twitter @DeathMedieval

The archaeologists toyed with the possibility that the bodies may have been cannibalised at a time of famine. But the knife marks didn’t suggest de-fleshing and were concentrated in areas like the head and neck. This horrific practice seems to have endured from the 11th to the 14th century.

Needless to say this covers the period of our very own Knights Templar.

Of course we are still obsessed with the subject of zombies – witness the success of The Walking Dead. I’ve also just discovered a Twitter site called Medieval Death Bot where real stories of curious deaths in the Middle Ages are tweeted every day.

 

The medieval roots of Halloween

Posted on by Tony McMahon
It's that time of year once again, Halloween u...
It’s that time of year once again, Halloween ushers in the best holiday of the Holiday season! Taken at La Mesa Oktoberfest in 2007 but still relevant every Halloween. 

Pumpkins, trick or treat and witch costumes. We all know about modern Halloween – but how might a Templar have celebrated the same day? Back in the early Middle Ages, the day we now call Halloween was more commonly called All Hallows Eve. It was the day before All Saints Day – a major Catholic feast.

Hallow came from an Old English word for holy or sanctified. The day was a liturgical vigil where the faithful were required to attend church, fast and pray. But there was always a hangover from pre-Christian practices. This was the transition from summer to winter – a time when peasants gathered in the harvest and into November, the ‘blood month’, where animals were killed and salted. Having an abundance of food – hopefully, famine permitting – there was a perfect excuse to feast and drink.

From the moment Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the church had to deal with pagan rituals that involved dancing, singing, drinking and gorging on food. What to do? Ban them – which the church attempted – or co-opt them into the church calendar, trying to draw out the pagan sting. That was the route the church gradually adopted.

So, around October 31st the Christian community was faced with a festivity where bonfires were lit to propitiate the sun god – who was now in retreat to the darkness. The sun was thanked for its good work, nourishing the fruits of the earth. Peasants hoped for its glowing return in the spring.

Some believe that in ancient Britain, the people at this time hailed a deity called Samhain, the lord of death, who gathered up the souls of the evil imprisoned within the bodies of animals. It’s said that this was altered by Christians to create a day in the Middle Ages where the souls of those in purgatory were prayed for. The bonfires continued and people would go to their neighbours’ houses in the village offering condolences to the bereaved – did this morph into trick or treat?

Dressing up in outlandish costumes had always been a part of pagan festivities and this element of Samhain worship could have trickled into All Hallows Eve. One idea is that the souls of the Christian dead wandered the earth until All Saints Day on November 1st. So, Halloween was their last chance to exact mischief on the living. Those not wishing to be recognised by the dead as they committed their last wicked deeds would wear masks and disguises – hence dressing up on this day.

Comparisons are also made to the Roman festival around the goddess Pomona. Her symbol was an apple and it’s been posited that the origin of apple bobbing at Halloween comes from Pomona related rites. It’s hard to deny that Christians reworked Roman festivals into the new religion, giving them new meaning. There’s evidence that the church actively discussed the dilemma of winning over converts who were attached to the old pagan ways. The solution seems to have been to let the common people carry on with their superstitions but direct their gaze to the Christian god instead.

The 31st October comes right before All Saints Day – November 1st – a feast called Hallowmas. Therefore Halloween was the eve before this important event in the liturgical calendar. It’s a Christian feast day believed to date back to the seventh century AD when the Pantheon, a vast and still standing temple built by the emperor Hadrian, was re-dedicated to all the saints. It had previously been dedicated to all the gods – but there was only one god now!

That was followed in the eleventh century with the introduction of All Souls Day on November 2nd. In case you’re confused – All Saints Day celebrated those who had succeeded in entering heaven while All Souls Day involved lots of praying for those who had not – lingering instead in purgatory (God’s waiting room). So a lot of attention was paid to the fate of the dead at this time of year, which has obviously informed the modern Halloween. Even our use of scary spiders, toads and bats reflects creatures within whom the souls of those in purgatory were sometimes thought to inhabit while they waited for their ticket into heaven.

I realise there is a terrific amount of soul searching – pardon the pun – over the Christian meaning of Halloween. I’m happy to hear your views and have some discussion about this ahead of the big day!

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Vatican scandal – a history of papal wickedness

Posted on by Tony McMahon

Jean-Paul Laurens, Le Pape Formose et Étienne ...

The Knights Templar were answerable only to the pope. But some of those popes were thoroughly corrupt and venal. They were probably some of the biggest sinners in Christendom.

So, let’s take a look at some papal corruption down the ages!

When the empire of Charlemagne was slowly imploding in the ninth century, the Holy See passed to the cardinal of Porto – who took the name Formosus. He was accused in his lifetime of various acts of church corruption but may have fallen victim to the power politics of the time, in which he was an active participant.

After his death, his opponents decided that the small matter of not being alive should be no barrier to being put on trial. And so his corpse was exhumed, dressed in papal vestments and interrogated at the so-called Cadaver Synod. Formosus was found guilty of all charges, stripped of the aforementioned vestments, his fingers cut off to stop any benedictions from the grave and his body was tossed into the Tiber.

John XIIThe following century saw the pontificate of John XII who really was a dubious character. Celebrating mass without bothering to take communion was small beer compared to his other sins. He was reputed to have turned the Lateran Palace into a brothel and to have ordained a ten year old as a bishop. Blinding and castrating his enemies and toasting the devil – there was nothing John wasn’t capable of! He eventually died after suffering “paralysis” while in bed with a lady.

In 1032, the Count of Tusculum installed his own son as pope – never mind that he was barely 12 years old! Benedict IX went on to hold the papacy three times before his death at 43 years of age. His second term as pope ended when he decided to sell the office to his godfather! He then changed his mind and came back, seizing the papacy for one last time.

Another pope who took cash for religious positions – the crime of ‘simony’ – was Boniface VIII. He features prominently in the History Channel drama about the Knights Templar – Knightfall. I write about him at length in another blog post so please search for that.

Fast forward to the Renaissance! The Borgias ran St Peters like a family enterprise at the end of the fifteenth century. Alexander VI was the most infamous Borgia, the nephew of a preceding pope, Callixtus III.  Alexander was alleged by the lawyer Stefano Infessura to have bought the papacy with mule loads of silver and his claim to have gained a two thirds majority is highly suspect.

Needless to say, Alexander had several children who he brazenly installed in major ecclesiastical positions – most notably, Cesare Borgia. His daughter, Lucrezia, was married off to a nobleman but reputed to have an incestuous relationship with her father. She was also claimed to be an adept poisoner

In my own lifetime, I remember when the former head of the Banco Ambrosiano – a bank strongly linked to the Vatican – was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in my home town of London. This was back in 1982. Roberto Calvi was dubbed ‘God’s Banker’ and while his death was supposed to look like suicide, it didn’t escape the attention of many that the secretive P2 masonic lodge that dominated Italy’s elite at that time was known as the ‘frati neri’ – or black friars!

The death of John Paul I after only 33 days as pope in 1978 is now a largely forgotten papal scandal – but at the time, the conspiracy theories flew around like a blizzard. There’s even a story element in the movie Godfather III that alludes to the mysterious nature of his demise. Suffice to say that the Vatican did nothing to dampen the speculation by its hopeless handling of the affair.

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Quest for the True Cross – FAQs

Posted on by Tony McMahon
Quest for the True Cross – first in the Templar series

This week sees the official launch of Quest for the True Cross – my Templar adventure, which you can download HERE. I’ve been asked certain questions over and over – and in case you can’t get hold of me this week, here are some quotable answers.

Will this be a Dan Brown type book?

Absolutely not!  From day one, when I started work on this two years ago, I wanted to ground a story about the Templars in the medieval period. There is mystery, adventure and suspense – but all seen through the eyes of 12th century Templars, Moors, kings, bishops and Saracens.

Tell us about the main character?

Sir William de Mandeville is based on a real person – the son of the first Earl of Essex who did indeed end up in a coffin suspended above the ground in an apple tree as I describe.  William is forced to return from the crusades in the Holy Land and in modern terms is suffering from something like post traumatic stress.  This being the Middle Ages though, he thinks he possessed by a demon. Finding his father hanging in a tree doesn’t improve his mental state and propels him on a quest. This is the key theme of the book – William’s struggle to win back his family honour and hold on to his sanity.

What about his companion Pathros?

He’s an important character. A Syrian Christian whose family has fallen victim to the invasion of the Seljuk Turks. Pathros’ father is imprisoned in a dungeon never to be seen again. He leaves Saracen-controlled Aleppo to make a life for himself among the crusaders in Jerusalem. But even though he is taken in by the Templars as a ‘turcopole’ – an auxiliary – his background precludes him ever becoming a full knight. Pathros is stuck between two worlds: he’s rejected by the Saracen east because he’s not a Muslim and he’s rejected by the crusader west because he’s a Syrian and his version of Christianity is viewed as heretical.

You say this book will disappoint those on the far right who have tried to appropriate the Templars for themselves?

Oh yes. If Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik thinks killing children at a summer camp bears any resemblance to the Knights Templar then he’s as deluded as most sane people think he is. The Templars were not sociopathic, murderous loners – they were very much a part of medieval society operating at its highest echelons. They were bankers, farmers, politicians, monks and warriors.

So how do you depict the Middle Ages?

I show all the political dirt, the intriguing, the violence and the massive upheavals that shook people and destroyed their lives.  William lived in a world where Constantinople was still the greatest city and trade was conducted between Cairo, Cordoba, Paris and London. It was a much more globalised place than we sometimes imagine. Christian western Europe was establishing its ascendancy over the Islamic south and the Byzantine east. The balance of power was about to be hugely altered.

Is it full of battle action?

From the start, you’ll get plenty of war!  But it’s the last hundred pages and the taking of Al-Usbuna that will have you on the edge of your seat. William fights alongside the great heroes of Portuguese history – Dom Afonso Henriques, Geraldo Geraldes Sem Pavor, Gualdim Pais, Hugo Martins, Martin Moniz and Pedro Pitoes. I don’t portray them all sympathetically and I might upset some readers with my depictions of these characters. But it’s a warts and all read and neither side – Christian or Muslim – comes out of it unblemished.

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Charing Cross – the devotion of a king to his dead wife

Posted on by Tony McMahon

Edward I – the king who defeated Braveheart – could never be regarded as a particularly sentimental man but when it came to his wife, he was a clearly a very devoted husband.  Eleanor of Castile was the great great granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the feisty queen of Henry II.  She was also the great grandaughter of Eleanor of England, a daughter of that same king.  Medieval England certainly spawned a surfeit of Eleanors!

Castile was an emerging European power as it pushed back the Islamic realm of southern Spain and originally, Eleanor was intended to be married in to the royal family of the neighbouring Christian kingdom of Navarre.  However, Edward I’s father – King Henry III – was troubled by the claims Castile was making to the duchy of Aquitaine, then still under English control, and decided the best way to deal with that problem was to marry his son to the Castilian princess.

Eleanor was no shrinking violet and in the wars that her husband, as king, would have to fight against the English barons and external foes – she proved to be a very strong support for him.  However, her life would be cut short – though not at a remarkably young age by the standards of the time. Journeying with Edward towards Lincoln, she caught a fever and died at the age of 49.

This clearly devastated the king who erected twelve ‘Eleanor Crosses‘ at the staging points on her slow procession back to London.  This included crosses – initially in wood and later in stone – at Lincoln, Northamption, St Albans, Waltham and Westcheap and then finally at Charing.  The last cross was in a small hamlet near the city of Westminster, the centre of royal power.

The cross was in place there from the 1290s to the Cromwellian period in the mid-17th century but was then demolished as part of another wave of anti-idolatrous as well as anti-monarchist sentiment.  It stood more or less where the statue of king Charles I now stands at the end of Trafalgar Square, by Admiralty Arch.  The cross you can now see outside Charing Cross station is a Victorian confection.

Inside Charing Cross underground station, there are murals depicting the construction of the original cross which I’ve taken a few photos of: