Paul Christopher: The Sword of the Templars

“So what happened?” Whitey Tarvanin asked, suddenly getting interested.

“There had always been rumors about some sort of treasure hidden in the Temple of Solomon, maybe even the Ark of the Covenant, the box that supposedly held the second set of the Ten Commandments brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses.”

“Second set?” Tarvanin asked.

“Moses broke the first tablets,” said Granger, a football jock with the nickname Bullet, which probably had something to do with the shape of his head. He was also the class’s biggest ьber-Christian. The hefty point guard had been scowling at Holliday since he’d mentioned Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. A sensitive topic for a lot of people, although Holliday wasn’t quite sure why; after all, it was a novel, a work of fiction, not a campaign platform or a sermon. Granger cleared his throat as though he was embarrassed about displaying too much knowledge in front of a teacher. “God wrote them down a second time and Moses put them in the Ark. It’s in the Bible.”

“It’s also in the Koran,” said Holliday mildly. “It has a deep significance for Muslims as well as Christians.”

Granger’s scowl darkened and his big head turtle-tucked down into his beef-slab shoulders.

“Did these guys find it?” Tarvanin asked.

“Nobody’s quite sure. They found something, we know that much. Some say it was gold from King Solomon’s Mines; others say it was the Ark of the Covenant; others say it was the secret wisdom of At lantis. Whatever they found, within a year the Knights Templar were loaded. They financed their pilgrim escort service, built castles up and down the pilgrim routes to Jerusalem, and sold their muscle to anyone who could pay.

“Because of the distances involved between Europe and the Holy Land, they borrowed an idea from their Saracen enemies and introduced an encrypted note of transfer-a deposit of money in one place could be transferred on paper for thousands of miles. Wire transfers before they had wires.

“The Templars also began making loans at interest, although this was specifically forbidden in the Bible. As time went on the Templars even began financing entire wars. Land and other assets were regularly used as collateral and often wound up being forfeited, expanding the Templars’ power and wealth even more.

“Within a hundred years the Templars were into everything: loan-sharking, real estate, the protection rackets, shipping, smuggling, bribery, you name it. By the end of the next century they were the next best thing to a multinational conglomerate, and there’s no doubt that much of it came from illicit sources.

“In most major cities of the time, from Rome to Jerusalem, Paris and London to Frankfurt and Prague, you didn’t make a major move without consulting the local Templar authority. They controlled politics and banks, and owned entire fleets of ships. They were their own army, and by the beginning of the fourteenth century they had an unsurpassed intelligence network that spanned the known world. By then, of course, Jerusalem was back in the hands of the infidel, and the Holy Land was a battleground once again, but by then it didn’t matter anymore.”

“So what happened then, sir?” Zitz Mitchell asked.

“They got a little too big for their britches,” explained Holliday. “King Philip of France had just fought a long war with England. He was broke and he owed the Templar banks a lot of money. They were on the verge of taking over the entire country. The Pope was getting a little nervous, too; the Templars had far too much power within the church and were easily capable of putting their own man on the papal throne if they chose to.

“Something had to be done. Pope Clement and King Philip concocted a plan, laid charges against the Order for various crimes, some real and some false, and on Friday the thirteenth, 1307, most of the Templar leaders in France were arrested. They were tried for heresy, convicted, tortured, and burned at the stake. Eventually the Pope ordered every Catholic king in Europe to seize Templar assets under threat of excommunication, and by 1312 the Knights Templar had ceased to exist. Some say that the Templar fleet took the Order’s treasure to Scotland for safekeeping, and other people think that they managed to flee to America, although there’s no proof of that.”

“I don’t see the point,” said Whitey Tarvanin. “It’s like most of this historic stuff. What’s it got to do with right now? With us?”

“Quite a bit actually,” replied Holliday. It was an argument he’d heard a thousand times, usually from the mouths of gung-ho kids exactly like Whitey Tarvanin. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it’?” There were a lot of blank looks. Holliday nodded. He wasn’t surprised.

“The quote is generally attributed to a man named George Santayana, a Spanish-born American philosopher of the early twentieth century. In the way that Adolf Hitler forgot the lessons of history and tried to invade Russia in the winter. If he’d remembered Napoleon’s disastrous attempt he might have consolidated the Western Front instead and won the war in Europe. If we’d paid attention to history and remembered the decades-long failure of the French in Vietnam, maybe we wouldn’t have tried to prosecute that war in the same way they did and maybe we wouldn’t have lost it.”

“So what does that have to do with these Templar guys?” Zitz Mitchell asked.

“They got too powerful and they forgot who their friends were,” said Holliday. “Just like we did. The United States came out of the Second World War with a per capita casualty rate that was lower than Canada’s, and we suffered none of the catastrophic damage done to Europe and Great Britain. We also had made enormous industrial wartime loans that put us into the world’s economic forefront. We dominated the world, just like the Templars. People got jealous. People got pissed off.”

“9/11,” said Tarvanin.

“Among other things,” said Holliday. “And to make things worse we started mixing religion with politics. An old argument just like the Crusades. Our God is better than your god. ‘God Is with Us’ on the Nazi belt buckles. Holy Wars against women and children, Catholics killing Protestants in Belfast. We went into Iraq for the wrong reasons and we left our friends behind. More people have been killed in the name of God and so-called ‘faith-based values’ than for any other reason.

“You can bully people into being your allies, but when things get bad don’t expect them to stand beside you, especially when you put God into the mix. The separation of Church and State. That’s what the Constitution is for, although we seem to have forgotten that, as well. And as for the relevance of history you can probably trace the troubles in the Middle East directly back to Moses.”

“Don’t you believe in God?” Bullet Granger asked.

“My personal beliefs have nothing to do with it,” said Holliday quietly. He’d been here before, as well-shaky ground, the kind of thing that could get you into trouble.

“You’re always knocking Christians and the Bible. Moses, and like that,” Granger argued.

“Moses was a Jew,” said Holliday, sighing. “So was Christ as a matter of fact.”

“Yeah, well,” grumbled the big football player, brooding. The bell rang.

Saved.

Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday stepped out of Bartlett Hall and paused for a moment, enjoying the early-evening sunlight that bathed the gray stones of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Directly in front of him was the broad expanse of the Plain, the celebrated parade ground that had felt the heels of ranks of marching cadets for more than two hundred years. All the greats had been here, ghosts in cadence from George Armstrong Custer to Dwight D. Eisenhower. To Holliday’s left were a score of other stone buildings rising like the protective bastions of some crusader’s castle. To the right, beyond the baseball diamond on Doubleday Field, were the bluffs that stood above the wide silver brushstroke of the Hudson River as it flowed the last fifty miles down to New York City and the sea.