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1125. AN OAK TABLE IN A LARGE HALL IN A SMALL COUNTY NAMED PORTUGALE . . .
The aged velum parchment is a donation of a small town near the city of Braga.
It reads, “I, Queen D. Tereja give to God and the Knights of the Temple of Solomon the village called Fonte Arcada . . . with all its rights and benefits, for the good of my soul.”1
The generous donation includes no less than seventeen additional land grants by local families.2 Meticulously written in pen and ink, it is signed, “I, Guilherme, Procurator of the Temple in this territory, receive this document.”
The signatory holds the key to a mystery. As Procurator of the Temple, Guilherme Ricard is invested with the power and authority to conduct transactions on behalf of the Grand Master of the Knights Templar in Jerusalem, Hugues de Payns. But he is much more than that. His name appears on a second grant—this time as Magister Donus Ricardus—for half the estate of Villa-nova, donated by Affonso Annes “to God, and the brotherhood of the Knights Templar.”3
This Guilherme Ricard is also the first Master of the Knights Templar in a small county named Portugale.4
These events are extraordinary because the year is 1125 and no members of the Knights Templar are known to exist outside Jerusalem, least of all in a region on the opposite side of Europe. Stranger still, in 1111, seven years before the Templar brotherhood came into existence, the knights were awarded a strategic property in this same territory.
Three things are certain.
One: the Knights Templar pledged allegiance not to the pope but to an influential monk in the French county of Champagne.
Two: in a document addressing the Templars, a young man destined to be king of a land that will be known as Portugal reveals that “within your Brotherhood and in all your works I am a Brother.”
And three: during interrogation by the Holy Inquisition, a Templar knight made a cryptic statement: “There exists in the Order a law so extraordinary on which such a secret should be kept, that any knight would prefer his head cut off rather than reveal it to anyone.”
And virtually all captured Templars proved this by being burned alive at the stake.
What follows is the true and untold story behind the first Templar nation.
