Caravaggio by Christopher Peachment

Author:Christopher Peachment
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

A Long Digression on the Order

A new kind of monster, compounded of purity and corruption, a monk and a knight.

Henry of Huntingdon (1084–1155) Historia Anglicorum.

Of Henry of Blois (1101–71), Bishop of Winchester and brother of King Stephen.

A word here, perhaps, about the knights is in order. I did much reading in the fortress library, with a little help from Malaspina, for my Latin letters are not what they might be. He also showed me around the fortress’s museum, which contains many relics of the knights’ great deeds. It seems that the original order of the Knights Templar was disbanded under grave circumstance. They had, as I said, originated during the Crusades, and set up and maintained castles for the safety of visiting pilgrims. They looked after the sick like the Hospitallers. But as the years went by they became bankers and so very wealthy.

If a pious merchant wanted to visit the shrine of the Sepulchre, well good for him, the knights would help all they could. The journey could take anything up to a year from London or the Baltic states, the seas were hazardous and the land routes crawling with bandits. So the good gentleman was a bit worried about carrying too much money with him. No problem, said the knights. Just lodge a nice fat casket of your wife’s jewellery with us, we give you a letter of credit you can keep safe tucked up inside your corsets, and then when you reach Jerusalem, you can cash it in at our special agency we have set up for that very purpose.

So the knights realized something that most ordinary men do not. You will never get wealthy by working for someone else. And it is easier and better paid to set up a bank than to rob one. And they became very, very wealthy indeed.

As for the pilgrims who did finally make it, and knelt at the Holy Stone and then came back, well, good for them, that should earn a few extra years at the right hand of God. But they had still left a tidy sum with the good knights and of course it all earned interest at the usual Jew rates, and that soon adds up when a man is away for at least a year on a pilgrimage.

Some said that they indulged in alchemy too, and I can well believe that they did. Of course, for the swine of the Inquisition this was tantamount to witchcraft, but then anything is tantamount to witchcraft if it suits their purpose. My friend Bruno was often trying out alchemical pursuits and they often succeeded. He said that the idea was, in fact, not to create gold, but to change base earthly matter into something spiritual and other-worldly.

I forget how he worked it exactly, but anyway, he did quite often cause a huge explosion among his flasks and tubes, and we’d all rush in and there he would be, standing there with his clothes smouldering and no eyebrows, and there’d be a little puddle of gold on the dish in front of him, still molten from the blast.

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