The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (15 page)

Someone objected to this on the ground that the first owner of the Shroud is found named as
Geoffroy de Charny, while the surname of the Templar preceptor appears in the various documents naming him in different forms, that is as Charny, but also
Charneyo, Charnayo, Charniaco
. In the objectors’ view, that is, there is a little difference in sound which would be enough to suppose that the two names were different. I take the liberty to reply that in an administration register from the age of King Philip VI of
Valois, the surname of the first owner of the Shroud is given in the forms de Charneyo and also
Charni, Charnyo
or else
Charniaco
, just as is found in the case of his kinsman
Geoffroy, dead at the stake on 18 March 1314 together with Jacques de
Molay.
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This kind of hair-splitting on the basis of mediaeval Latin spelling variants can only be fed to someone who has no practice of mediaeval documents. It would work out if our characters had lived in the France of Napoleon or Victor Hugo, that is in a world dominated by printed paper and in a culture which is officially French-speaking.

For mediaeval society things are quite different. The acts of the Templars’
trial, like a countless amount of other contemporary documents, were hand-written, which means that it was easy to make small mistakes; but above all, they were composed in Latin by teams of notaries who translated simultaneously into Latin while they heard the witnesses speak in their native language, in this case French. All French surnames did not have Latin forms, and yet the way had to be found to render their often peculiar sounds into Latin; so adaptations were made, and they could well be different from notary to notary.

For this reason we find the same character quoted in quite different forms, whose variety can seem downright ridiculous to us. Jacques de
Molay’s surname can also be found written as
Malay
,
Molaho
and
Malart
, while the Visitor of the West, Hugues de
Pérraud, is also called
Parando
,
Peraudo
,
Penrando
,
Penrado
,
Peralto
,
Peraut
but even
Peraldo
,
Paurando
and
Deperando
. In the case of Templar leaders who lived before the trial, the situation can be even more curious: Gilbert
Erail’s surname is also found written
Roral
,
Arayl
,
Herac
,
Eraclei
and Eraclius, while that of Robert de
Sablé turns up as
Sabolio
,
Sabluillio
,
Salburis
,
Sabloel
and
Sabloil
. And this phenomenon is just as common in the registers of mediaeval Popes: in one and the same letter, written by the same notary, it often happens that the same surname is spelled differently.
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If we are to assess facts within their historical context, I would say that the notaries transcribed the name of
Geoffroy de Charny fairly faithfully, indeed better than many other cases.

What we can deduce from the records of the
trial against the Templars strengthens
Wilson’s theory.
Geoffroy de Charny belonged to the narrow circle of Jacques de
Molay’s loyalists, and he was the only
compaignon dou Maistre
reckoned by
Nogaret as powerful enough within the Temple to lock him up in the dungeons of Chinon together with the members of the Templar headquarters, the kind of isolation selected for him, and the attempt to keep him from the Pope when the Pope had asked to question them, leads us to suppose that Charny and the others were able to give an important witness.
Geoffroy came from a family of knightly rank and had become a Templar in 1269 at the mansion of Étampes, in the diocese of Sens: his ceremony of admission was celebrated by a high Templar officer called Amaury de La Roche, of whom we shall speak later, a front-rank figure in the Temple, but also very closet to the crown of France. It must have been an important ceremony, since even the preceptor of Paris, Jean le Franceys, left his mansion to attend.

Born about 1250, the knight
Geoffroy de Charny was in 1294 in charge of the mansion of Villemoison, in Bourgogne, and one year later, at no more than 45 years old, received the responsibility for the Templar province of Normandy; he had an outstanding career, but it is not only his hierarchic rank that determined power and prestige in the Temple. Templar sources show that this man was always very close to the person of Jacques de
Molay; in 1303 he was in the mansion of Marseille, where he witnessed the admission of a young servant of the Grand Master, charged with the care of his harness and horses, who was received by Symon de Quincy, the then supervisor of the sea journeys to
Outremer
. Marseille was France’s main port for the East, and both testimonies assert that the monks present at that chapter then left for Cyprus: a norm of the hierarchic statutes forbade preceptors of western provinces from going to
Outremer
except in obedience to a specific order from the Grand Master, so it is certain that
Geoffroy de Charny was in that place while travelling with other brothers to reach Jacques de
Molay.
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There certainly was a strong tie of personal friendship between the Grand Master and
Geoffroy de Charny: the chronicle known as the
Continuation of Guillaume de Nangis
remembers that it was only the Preceptor of Normandy who chose to follow
Molay to the stake, shouting to the crowds, during the last appeal they had been granted, that the Temple was innocent and had not betrayed the Christian faith.
Geoffroy de Charny seemed to be constantly among the most important dignitaries of the Temple.
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There is another detail, too. If we look at the
trial documents as a whole, we find that the Preceptor of Normandy
Geoffroy de Charny was known to his fellow-monks by a nickname connected to his area of origin. Just as we would call someone “the Tuscan” or “the Sicilian”, Charny was also called
le berruyer
, which in 14th century French meant “the man from Berry”: it is the area known today as
Champagne berrichonne
, which lay in the later Middle Ages pressed between the two great powers, the Count of Champagne and the Duke of Bourgogne. This was exactly the area where the de Charnys lived and prospered, always having to cope with the difficult games forced by the presence of these mighty lords.
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The Templar preceptor of Normandy,
Geoffroy de Charny and the Bearer of the Oriflamme of France who owned the Shroud in the mid-thirteen hundreds, belonged in all likelihood to the same family, even though the sources don’t allow us to check in detail the exact degree of kinship. The De Charnys had connected themselves with the order of the Temple towards the end of the 12th century; in 1170 Guy sold a wood to the Temple, but his sons
Haton and
Symon, 11 years later, were to donate to the Order 15 arpenta of land, while in 1262 another member of the lineage, Adam, will make a gift to the order of the fief of Valbardin. It is to be noticed that these gifts often were made as “dowries” for a son about to enter the Order. The Templar domain in Charny was only a quarter of a league away from the command. Thanks to the cartulary of Provins we are informed that in 1241 a Templar by the name of
Hugues de Charny was living, and he may well be an uncle of the future Preceptor of Normandy.
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The family were also concerned (though indirectly) with another event that concerned the Shroud closely: the
fourth crusade, with the dreadful sack of
Constantinople during which the relic vanished. Count Guillaume de
Champlitte, one of the leading barons who took part in the storming of
Constantinople and then became Prince of Achaia, sought the hand of Elisabeth of the lineage of Mont Saint-Jean, lords of Charny. Already by the mid-twelfth century the fief of Charny was very closely connected to the de Courtenay family:
Peter I de Courtenay, lord of Charny among other fiefs and youngest son of
Louis the Fat, King of France, was the father of
Peter II de Courtenay, who would become Emperor of
Constantinople in 1205; one year after the conquest of the Greek metropolis, a member of the de Courtenay lineage resided in Charny castle. Later, even after the Greeks had recovered the Eastern Empire, the de Charnys kept significant contact with the fiefs they had built up over there; early in the 1300s, the knight
Dreux de Charny married the noblewoman Agnès, heir of the Greek lordship of Vostzitza.
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Known sources anyway suggest that the family de Charny did not come into the Shroud’s possession immediately after the great sack, but many decades later.

The tragedy of the
fourth crusade

On 10 October 1202, the army of the
fourth crusade sailed from the strand of Venice under the leadership of Marquess
Boniface of Montferrat. It was a vast contingent, made up of about 33,000 crusaders, largely of French origin, and about 17,000 Venetians. The strand of the mighty sea power was as far as the French barons with their feudal levies had been able to come; they had been forced to wait far longer than anyone had imagined: apart from sincere intentions to recover Jerusalem and the
Holy Sepulchre, the accounts had been very badly drawn up, and organisers had ended up with getting in heavy debt with the Republic’s dockyards. The shipbuilders had dedicated whole months to the Crusade and now wanted to be paid. So the expedition was being born with a grave weakness: economic interests placed a mighty control over religious ideals, a control that would eventually prove able to stifle them. In previous months, when it had become known that the Crusade was intended to attack Egypt, the Venetians had grown very reluctant to accept it, because they saw no advantage in investing in an idea that would not have been particularly profitable for their city. The Doge kept the delegates waiting no less than two weeks, then made a counter-proposal: Venice would provide the transport ships for the crusaders and one full year’s supplies in exchange for costs being covered in advance and the right to a half of what would be conquered. The French barons accepted without delay, showing some considerable naivety.
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After stopping in Pola to clear the shore from pirates, on 10 November the fleet attacked Zadar (Zara): that was a grim omen of the future, for the Venetians compelled the army to loot the city, which was Christian but belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary and was a prime target for Venice. They wintered near Zara, the sea being too stormy to risk travelling on; then, when the fair seasons returned, the fleet struck a course towards Corfu. Meanwhile, the other half of the Christian army was waiting in the Holy Land; after Pope
Innocent III’s call, all the forces of the Christian kingdom had mobilised, and the military orders, the Templars and
Hospitallers, had worked out a plan of operation: as soon as it reached the coast of Syria, the army from Europe was to organise an expedition to shore up Christian presence in northern Syria and up to Armenia. Then Egypt would have to be attacked, because that was where the reinforcements to Jerusalem’s Muslim masters were coming.
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By the spring of 1203, the army was preparing to sail away from Corfu, but a change had been made: the leaders had decided to alter their route and go through
Constantinople, the mighty capital of the Greek Empire that stretched on both sides of the Bosporus. Several reasons were mentioned, but the most popular was to do with the sad fate of the legitimate Greek Emperor
Isaac II Angelos, who was blinded and overthrown. His son
Alexius had escaped to Europe and taken refuge with his sister, who had married Philip of
Swabia, the brother of Emperor
Henry VI; Philip had then asked for the Crusader troops to make their way to
Constantinople and help his brother-in-law
Alexius to recover power. It was just a matter of helping the legitimate dynasty, who would then, in gratitude, help the Crusade by placing at its disposal a considerable slice of the Byzantine army. Many lords were not convinced, however, they may have perceived that matters were getting out of hand, and so they abandoned the expedition and made their way to the Holy Land on their own.
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Both the goals and the purpose of the Crusade were already compromised. When the Roman Curia heard of the storming of Zara, Pope
Innocent III formally excommunicated the Venetians, guilty of the aggression. But the operation was no longer under the Pope’s control and had not been for months: Apostolic Legate
Pietro Capuano had been rejected by the Venetians, who no longer accepted him as the Pope’s representative because of the excessive distance between his views and theirs. The Cardinal had to go back and eventually reached the Holy Land by himself. On 18 July 1203, the host reached
Constantinople. The reasons that had been used for that bizarre detour were no longer valid, since the legitimate Emperor
Isaac Angelos, blinded though he had been by his enemies, had been set back on the throne by his own Greek subjects. A few months of peace and quiet broken by occasional episodes of violence: the army had made camp outside the city walls, and the crusaders were inspecting the magnificent capital looking greedily at all its treasures and thinking of potential loot. Some leading figures were invited by young
Alexius, crowned Emperor jointly with his father on 10 August 1203, and visited the monumental imperial palace with its inconceivable collection of relics: the French knight Geoffroy de
Villehardouin declared in his Chronicle that
Constantinople contained as many relics as the whole rest of the world put together.
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The debts made with the Venetians hung heavily over the expedition’s future. Emperor
Alexius tried to bring together what he could, but could only cover half the enormous sum for which he had made himself liable; understanding that the situation was out of control, he went as far as to expropriate the patrimonies of noble families and had church vessels of silver and gold melted down. In August, a Greek mob had assaulted the Latin quarter, taking advantage of the Emperor being out of town, and had set fire to the shops of Venetian, Genoese and Pisan merchants. A few days later, a mob of Flemish, Venetians and Pisans stormed the Muslim quarter and set the mosque on fire. A strong wind drove onward the flames and a whole quarter of
Constantinople was destroyed; about 15,000 Latins who were stable residents in
Constantinople took refuge with the Crusaders and swelled their ranks. By the end of 1203, the Crusader leaders sent the Emperor an ultimatum: if
Alexius did not fulfil his obligations at the earliest, their alliance would have been considered as broken and they would hold themselves to have the right to wage war against him. In January 1204 the imperial official
Alexius
Murzuphlos overthrew the emperor in a coup; he then caused the crusaders to understand that he did not intend to pay his predecessor’s debts and that he meant to chase them out of Byzantine soil. In March, the French barons and the Venetians met to plan the conquest of
Constantinople and the division of the future empire they would conquer once the capital had been forced to surrender. Firstly, Venice had to be compensated for the expenses she had suffered; then the Doge would have had first picks among the loot up to three quarters of the total; they also made the plans for the election of a new emperor, entrusted to a commission of six Frenchmen and six Venetians. The defeated party would have had the right to nominate the future Latin rite patriarch.
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