Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups by Charlotte Greig Read Free Book Online Page B

order of warrior monks who were based in Jerusalem during the time of the Crusades. They were believed to be fabulously wealthy and they became so powerful that in 1307 Philip IV of France led a campaign against them. Members of the order were arrested and tortured until they confessed to heresy. Their influence lingered on for many years, especially in Portugal and Scotland, but they gradually disappeared from view. However, many theorists believe that the order actually went underground instead of dying out and that it is still in existence.
    Members of the military order of the Templars. The order was persecuted for heresy, and then disbanded by the French King Philip IV in 1307, but the conspiracy theories surrounding it have not gone away.
    T HE H OLY G RAIL
Even more mysterious than the Knights Templar is the Holy Grail, one of the great myths of Christianity. The Holy Grail was supposedly the cup that caught the blood of Jesus during his crucifixion. The story goes that the cup was kept by a friend of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, who might have taken it to France, or perhaps even Glastonbury in England. Some believe that it was taken to Jerusalem in the Holy Land: others claim that it has been kept in Genoa, Valencia or Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. According to some accounts, it might even have fallen into the hands of the Knights Templar. Wherever it landed up, it became a mythical object over time and it was credited with extraordinary magical powers.
    Stories have circulated about the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar for centuries, but a modern bestseller
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
, published in 1982, suggested that behind these mysteries lay an even greater one – one that went to the very heart of the Christian faith. According to the authors of the book, the Holy Grail was not a cup at all: that was the result of a mistake in translation. The real Christian treasure was not the Holy Grail but the Holy Blood. That is, the true secret was not the existence of a mere cup but of a bloodline of the descendants of Jesus.
    T HE M AGDALENE C ONSPIRACY
According to this theory, Jesus had two children, the products of a clandestine marriage to Mary Magdalene. These children, so the story goes, were brought to France by Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea. The oldest child died but the second son went on to have children whose descendants would become the (real) Merovingian Kings of France between the fifth and eighth centuries AD. After the Merovingian Kings were overthrown, their legacy was protected by the Knights Templar and their great secret – together with the evidence to back it up – was hidden away. Its existence was only hinted at by obscure codes.
    The risen Christ appears to Mary Magdalene in Correggio's painting
Noli Me Tangere
. But was Christ ever actually dead?
    With the end of the Knights Templar, so this theory goes, all evidence of the bloodline of Jesus disappeared from view for over 500 years. It was only in 1885 that someone began to penetrate the mystery, a young priest named François Bérenger Saunière, who was assigned to the parish at Rennes-le-Chateau, an ancient walled town in the French Pyrenees.
    Saunière began to restore the town's sixth-century church. As he did so, he found a series of parchments hidden inside a hollow pillar. These parchments included some genealogical information and a collection of ciphers and codes. Allegedly the secrets of these codes made Saunière a wealthy man and he later spent much of his money on commissioning strange new artefacts for the church.
    T HE P RIORY OF S ION
With Saunière's death the trail once again went cold, only to be revived by a Frenchman named Pierre Plantard who wrote extensively about the mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau. He claimed that knowledge of the descendants of Jesus had remained in the hands of a mysterious organization called the Priory of Sion, an ancient secret order that lay behind the Knights Templar and guarded their