The World's Greatest Unsolved Mysteries by Patricia Fanthorpe & Patricia Fanthorpe

Author:Patricia Fanthorpe & Patricia Fanthorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

A selection of letters and documents relating to the famous Nanteos Cup, part of an ancient olive wood drinking vessel, believed by many to be the Holy Grail.

The spirited and attractive young Eleanor immediately married Henry Plantagenet of Anjou, destined to become Henry II of England and father of Richard the Lionheart. After Henry’s death, Eleanor became a very effective Regent while her famous son was away fighting in the Crusades.

But it was through one of her daughters by Louis VII, Marie de Champagne, that the troubadour culture reached Chretien. Marie became Countess of Champagne when she married Count Henry in 1164. She established a flourishing centre of troubadour culture at Troyes, modelled on Eleanor’s own cultural centre at Poitiers. It was while working and writing in Marie’s court that Chretien had close contact with many of the leading troubadours: men such as Jaufre Rudel, Bernart de Ventadorn and Raimbaut d’Aurenga. It is also highly significant that their troubadour culture was well established in the south-western parts of France known as the Midi—the area where the mysterious village of Rennes-le-Château is situated, where there were several Templar strongholds, and where the strange, heretical sect known as the Cathars or Albigensians once flourished.

When their almost impregnable fortress of Montségur fell in 1244, four Cathar mountaineers escaped with a great treasure, noted down in the Latin records as pecuniam infinitam: literally “unlimited money”. Might that priceless Cathar treasure have been the Lance or the Grail—or both? And what became of it after it left Montségur? After a period of safe storage in Rennes-le-Château did it finally cross the North Atlantic with Sinclair and his refugee Templars to find a safe new hiding place in the strange labyrinth below Oak Island, Nova Scotia?

The hero of Chretien’s version of the Grail story is Perceval, who seems to be based on the very much older history of the great Welsh hero Peredur, sometimes rendered Pryderi, from the Mabinogion. These stories from ancient Welsh history appear in The White Book of Rhydderch and The Red Book of Hergest. Both of these volumes date only from the fourteenth century, but the material in them seems to be much older, its original sources pre-dating the Christian era by many centuries. The mysterious and heroic Perceval reappears as Parzival in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s book of that name, which was put together round about 1205.

Von Eschenbach was a Bavarian knight, who claimed that his version of the story was accurate and that Chretien was wrong. Wolfram records that he got his information from Kyot de Provence, and that Kyot discovered it from Flegetanis, who is described as “a heathen scholar renowned for his high learning”. Kyot was otherwise known as Guiot the Troubadour, and he was one of many who attended the great Festival of Mayence in 1184, when the sons of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, were knighted by their father. Almost every poet and troubadour in medieval Christendom would have been there: Wolfram would certainly have attended,

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