NEVER-ENDING QUEST
From the first to the sixth century AD the empire centred on the city of Axum in northern Ethiopia could rightly claim to rank amongst the most powerful and prosperous in the known world. It dealt on equal terms with Rome and Persia and sent its navies sailing to ports as far afield as Egypt, India, Ceylon and China. Its architectural and artistic achievements were impressive and it became the first bastion of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, adopting the new faith as its official religion in the early fourth century AD (coincidentally at much the same time as the miraculous conversion of Constantine the Great).(1) By the seventh century, however, Axum's light had begun to dim; the embassies that it sent abroad were now few and far
between and its once formidable military power was clearly in decline. This marked change, which eventually led to total isolation, had much to do with the advance of the belligerent forces of Islam and the encirclement of Abyssinian Christianity during and after the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad (AD 570 — 632). 'Encompassed by the enemies of their religion,' wrote Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 'the Ethiopians slept for near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten.'(2)
The millennium to which the great English historian referred lasted from roughly the seventh to the sixteenth centuries, during which time it would be fair to say that Ethiopia all but disappeared from world consciousness. Formerly well known to outsiders, and relatively well travelled, this Christian country in the remote highlands of Africa was gradually transformed into a mysterious realm of myth and magic in which dragons and other monsters were believed to dwell — a terra incognita where no one dared (or wanted) to venture.
It would have been tempting to assume that the Abyssinians had reverted to barbarism or stagnated during the long, dark hole in their history. My researches had shown me, however, that the opposite was true: as the extraordinary rock-hewn churches of Lalibela proved, a rich and idiosyncratic culture had been preserved throughout. Moreover, although this culture was introverted and suspicious of the motives of foreign powers, it had stayed in contact with the outside world. Prince Lalibela himself had spent twenty-five years as an exile in Jerusalem in the second half of the twelfth century. And it had been from Jerusalem that he had returned to Ethiopia to claim his kingdom and to build the monolithic churches that now bear his name.
As outlined in Chapter 5, my findings had convinced me of the possibility that Lalibela might have been accompanied by a contingent of Templars when he left the Holy Land in 1185 to win back his throne. These knights, I believed, would have been motivated first and foremost by a desire to seek out the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. In furtherance of this end it seemed logical to suppose that they would have been more than willing to assist the prince to achieve his own political objectives — since by so doing they might reasonably have expected to gain great influence.
The reader will recall that I then learned of an Ethiopian tradition which told of the involvement of mysterious 'white men' in the construction of the Lalibela churches. This tradition was an ancient one. Indeed, it had already been very old when it had first been recorded in the early sixteenth century by a Portuguese visitor, Father Francisco Alvarez. I knew that the Templars had been great builders and architects,(3) and it was therefore difficult to resist the conclusion that they might have been the 'white men' who had had a hand in the creation of the rock-hewn monoliths. Furthermore, since the churches were twenty-four years in the making, the implication was that the knights had — at the very least — had a sustained presence in Ethiopia and perhaps had entertained plans for an even longer-term involvement in the affairs of that country.
The suspicion that this might indeed have been the case deepened as my research continued. In order to explain why, it is first of all necessary to acquaint the reader with what happened to the Templars during and immediately after the brutal suppression of the order in the early fourteenth century. It is also necessary to cross-reference this information with certain events that took place in Ethiopia at around the same time.
A PERIOD INVOLVED IN DARKNESS
Founded in the year 1119, and given official recognition by the church in 1128 at the Synod of Troyes, the Templars quickly rose to a position of great international power, wealth and prestige — a position from which they were nevertheless doomed to fall within two centuries. The history of the order's catastrophic collapse has been too frequently and thoroughly recounted elsewhere to require extensive repetition here.(4) Suffice it to say that quite suddenly, on Friday 13 October 1307, all Templars residing in France were arrested. This was a well co-ordinated operation that saw simultaneous dawn swoops on hundreds of Templar properties by the bailiffs and seneschals of the French king, Philip IV. By nightfall 15,000 men were in chains and Friday the 13th had won a unique place for itself in the popular imagination as the most unlucky and inauspicious date in the calendar.
The charges levelled against the Templars to justify their dramatic and humiliating arrests were as lurid as they were imaginative. They were accused, for example, of denying Christ and spitting on His image, and of giving each other indecent kisses 'in shame of human dignity, according to the profane rite of the order' (these kisses were said to be placed on the anus, navel and mouth of each initiate at the time of his induction). It was also alleged that they engaged in a wide range of other homosexual practices (which were 'required without the possibility of refusal'), and — last but not least — that they made offerings to idols.(5)
At this time (and until 1377) the official residence of the Papacy was the city of Avignon in Provence. The reasons for the abandonment of the Vatican need not be gone into here.(6) Obviously, however, the removal of the Holy See to a point so close to French territory gave King Philip great influence over the Pope (Clement V who had been crowned at Lyons in Philip's presence in 1305)(7). This influence was exercised to the detriment of the Templars, whose destruction Philip was determined to ensure not only in France but also in every other country in which they were established. To this end the French monarch put pressure on Clement V who in due course issued a bull (Pastorales praeeminentiae, dated 22 November 1307) which ordered the arrest of the Templars throughout the Christian world.(8)
Proceedings followed as far afield as England, Spain, Germany, Italy and Cyprus and, in 1312, another bull from the puppet Pope officially suppressed the order. Meanwhile thousands of Templars had been subjected to the most horrific tortures and inquisitions. Many were subsequently burned at the stake — including Grand Master Jacques de Molay and the Preceptor of Normandy, Geoffroi de Charnay.(9)
It is not my intention here to go in any depth into the persecution, trial and destruction of the Templars. I only became interested in these matters because of the evidence I had unearthed which suggested a possible Templar quest for the Ark in Ethiopia in the late twelfth century.
Having established that a group of knights could have accompanied Lalibela from Jerusalem in the year 1185 I naturally wondered what might have happened next and this curiosity led me to look for clues in the subsequent history of the Templar Order.
That history, of course, was rather short: less than 130 years after Lalibela's accession to the throne of Ethiopia the Templars had been rounded up, tortured, and burnt at the stake. Their properties and money had been shared out amongst the ruling houses of Europe; their order had ceased to exist; and their good name had been tainted by charges of sodomy, blasphemy and idolatry.
Nor, in the records of the last century of their existence, could I find a single shred of evidence to support the view of a sustained Templar quest in Ethiopia. After the early 1200s the trail simply went cold; from then until the arrests in 1307 the order seemed to have been concerned solely with its campaigns in the Near East and with the build-up of its own considerable power and wealth.
Where else, I wondered, might I find the information I was looking for? Few attempts had been made to chronicle developments in Ethiopia in the period that now concerned me. I knew, however, that James Bruce had done his utmost to gather and record ancient traditions during his lengthy visit in the eighteenth century. I therefore turned to his Travels — which I now kept constantly on my desk.
Towards the end of Volume I, as I had hoped, I came across several pages devoted to the reign of King Lalibela. Unfortunately much of what the Scottish adventurer had written was irrelevant to my own investigation. There was, however, one particular detail that attracted my attention. Drawing on 'the histories and traditions . . . thought the most authentic' in Ethiopia,(10) Bruce reported that Lalibela had promoted a scheme to reduce the downstream flow of water into the Nile river system in order 'to famish Egypt'.(11) After 'an exact survey and calculation', it seemed this illustrious monarch of the Zagwe dynasty had ascertained:
that there ran on the summit, or highest part [of Ethiopia], several rivers which could be intercepted by mines, and their stream directed into the low country southward, instead of joining the Nile, augmenting it and running northward. By this he found he should be able so to disappoint its increase, that it never would rise to a height proper to fit Egypt for cultivation.(12)
Such a project, I could not help but think, would certainly have suited Templar ambitions which, by the end of Lalibela's reign (AD 1211), had begun to focus on the conquest of Egypt.
Several extensive battles were fought at this time on the banks of the Nile, and the Templars spent more than a year besieging the Arab fortress at Damietta in the delta.(13) There could be no doubt, therefore, that a 'famished' and weakened Egypt would have been very much to their liking.
In the event, however, the diversion of the rivers was never completed: 'Death, the ordinary enemy of all these stupendous undertakings, interposed here and put a stop to this enterprise of Lalibela.(14) Bruce then added a comment on the last two monarchs of the Zagwe dynasty:
To Lalibela succeeded Imrahana Christos, remarkable for nothing but being son of such a father as Lalibela, and father to such a son as Naakuto Laab; both of them distinguished for works very extraordinary, though very different in their kind. The first, that is those of the father, we have already hinted at, consisting in great mechanical undertakings The other was an operation of the mind, of still more difficult nature, a victory over ambition, the voluntary abdication of a crown.'(15)
I was already familiar with the historical details that followed. In 1270, Naakuto Laab — the last of the Zagwes — was persuaded to abdicate his throne in favour of a certain Yekuno Amlak, a monarch claiming Solomonic descent. This king, as the reader may recall, had been biding his time in the distant province of Shoa where the Solomonic line had been preserved by the descendants of the single royal prince who had escaped the uprising of the Jewish queen Gudit in the tenth century.(16)
Bruce had little or nothing to say about Yekuno Amlak himself, or about his immediate successors, Yagba Zion (1285-94) and Wedem Ara'ad (who ruled until the year 1314). Indeed, it seemed that the normally fastidious research methods favoured by the Scottish traveller had failed to yield any solid information at all for the century that followed Lalibela's death in AD 1211: All this period is involved in darkness,' Bruce complained. 'We might guess, but since we are not able to do more, it answers no good purpose to do so much.(17)
Similar darkness, as I already knew, also enshrouded the period before Lalibela's accession to the throne. I was therefore left with a host of unanswered questions. Of these by far the most important concerned the Ark of the Covenant: I needed to know what had happened to it during the roughly 300 years (from the tenth to the thirteenth century) in which the rule of the Solomonic dynasty had been interrupted. And I needed to know whether the Templars might have gained direct access to the sacred relic if, as I supposed, they had established themselves in Ethiopia during Lalibela's reign.
Once again I telephoned the historian Belai Gedai in Addis Ababa to see if he could enlighten me with his knowledge of local traditions.
'In the tenth century', he told me, 'we Ethiopians say that the Ark was removed from Axum by the priests and the people in order to keep it safe from the ravages of Queen Gudit, and we say that it was brought to an island on Lake Zwai...'
'You mean in the Rift Valley — south of Addis Ababa?’
‘Yes.'
'That was a hell of a long way for it to be moved.'
'Yes, but no lesser distance would have been safe. Gudit was Jewish, you know. She wanted to establish the Falasha religion all over the country and she wanted to destroy Christianity. She came to burn and rob the churches at Axum. So the priests carried off the Ark to prevent it from falling into her hands, and they brought it very far — all the way to Zwai! — where they were sure that it would be out of her reach.'
'Do you know how long it remained on the island?'
'Our traditions say that it was there for seventy years and that after that it was taken back to Axum.'
I thanked Gedai for his help and rang off. What he had told me fitted — more or less — with the picture of Ethiopian medieval history that I had thus far managed to piece together. I knew that the throne of Ethiopia had been held by Gudit for some years after she had deposed the Solomonids. I also knew that she had eventually been succeeded by the first monarch of the Zagwe dynasty, himself probably a Jew.
Later, however (and certainly well before Lalibela's time), the Zagwes had converted to Christianity. It therefore seemed quite possible that they might have permitted the safe return of the Ark to its customary resting place in Axum — where, presumably, it would still have been when Lalibela came to power.
Of obvious relevance to this argument was the eyewitness account of the Ark in Ethiopia given by the Armenian geographer Abu Salih in his Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and some Neighbouring Countries. From internal textual evidence (the translator and editor of this important work explained in his Introduction), it was clear that it had been written 'in the first years of the thirteenth century(18) — in other words during the reign of Lalibela himself. And although Abu Salih at no point stated in which Ethiopian city he had seen the sacred relic, there was no good reason to suppose that this city had not been Axum. Moreover, as I re-read the relevant passage, I was struck by a few words that I had overlooked before. Describing the transportation of the Ark on certain ceremonial occasions, the geographer had noted that it was 'attended and carried' by bearers who were 'white and red in complexion, with red hair'.(19)
With a shock of genuine excitement I realized that I was looking at a second piece of pure and early testimony suggesting the presence of mysterious white men in Ethiopia at the time of King Lalibela (particularly so since another authoritative translation of the same passage rendered 'red hair' as 'blond hair'(20). Alvarez had already alerted me to the old tradition that white men had built the wonderful rock-hewn churches — a tradition that fitted well with what I knew about the advanced architectural skills possessed by the Templars. Now, as though to bear out my own evolving theory, here was Abu Salih addressing me across seven centuries with the electrifying news that men who were white and red in complexion, men with red or even blond hair — men, in other words, who sounded very much like northern Europeans — had been associated closely and directly with the Ark of the Covenant itself.
The possibility that these men might have been Templars was a very seductive one, but it still left my investigation stranded in the early thirteenth century and it still left the key questions unanswered. If the northern Europeans seen by Abu Salih had indeed been Templars then had they just contented themselves with carrying the relic from time to time or had they perhaps tried to remove it from Ethiopia and take it back to Europe? Most Important of all — if they had tried, had they succeeded?
On all these points, I had to admit, I was effectively blocked by the absolute lack of historical information. Obsessively secretive Is the Templars had undoubtedly been(21) it did not really surprise me that their own documents and records yielded so little. Nor was there any
comfort to be gained from Ethiopian annals: after examining a wide range of different sources, I was forced to accept that the century after the death of King Lalibela had indeed been a period 'involved in darkness', just as James Bruce had observed. Almost nothing was known about what had gone on in these years.
(Figure 36-47)
I was by now feeling extremely pessimistic about the prospects of ever breaking the research deadlock. Nevertheless I telephoned Richard Pankhurst in Addis Ababa and asked him if there were any records which might suggest that there had been contacts of any kind between Ethiopians and Europeans during the period in question.
'None that I know of before 1300,' he replied.
'And how about after 1300? I suppose the first documented European contact was with the Portuguese embassy that arrived in Ethiopia in 1520?'
'Not quite. A small number of missions travelled in the other direction before that — I mean from Ethiopia to Europe. As it happens, the very first of these was sent within a century of Lalibela's death — so that does put it into the period you're interested in.'
I sat forward in my chair: 'Do you happen to know the exact date?'
'Yes, I do,' Richard replied. 'It was 1306, and it was quite a large mission. It was sent by the Emperor Wedem Ara'ad and it had, I believe, about thirty members.'
'Yes, I do,' Richard replied. 'It was 1306, and it was quite a large mission. It was sent by the Emperor Wedem Ara'ad and it had, I believe, about thirty members.'