11

1100. BRAGA. HEARING FOREIGN VOICES . . .

It was not uncommon to hear people in the streets of Braga speaking in their native French tongue. By the mid-eleventh century there already existed a conclave of Burgundians living in and around the city,¹ as though the area was their medieval holiday resort.² One of these people was Pedro Arnaldo da Rocha, son of the family de la Roche from the Burgundian county of Roche, which they owned.^*7

At some point the smell of the ocean enticed two family members to relocate from Burgundy to a small coastal village not far from Braga.³ En route Madame de la Roche gave birth to Pierre Arnolde in the Portuguese riverside city of Santa Erea.^†24

Pierre Arnolde became Pedro Arnaldo in his new home, and his role in the creation of a Portuguese nation-state begins with a short, casual statement made in the archives of the Cistercian monastery of Alcobaça, in a black book with a white border titled Second Part of the Codex Alcobaciensis, where exists the following entry: “Hujus tempore moritur Arnandus, qui juvenis ivit ad bellum Syriae cum bono Comite Henrico, e multa fortia egerat” (This is the time of Arnando’s death, who as a young man went to war in Syria with good Count Henrique, and many great deeds he has done).⁵

Arnaldo da Rocha would have been between twenty and thirty years of age when he accompanied the Count of Portugale to the Holy Land, and for such a situation to have taken place there must have existed a close bond between the two men. Obviously, they shared the same Burgundian heritage, with the de la Roche property actually situated within the district of Dijon, Dom Henrique’s birthplace; one family member was even employed as a steward of the Duke of Burgundy, from whom Dom Henrique was descended.⁶ When the de la Roche family settled in Portugale they chose the town of Vianna, 33 miles from the royal seat in Guimarães. With the city of Braga in-between, both families would have moved in the same social circles, even attended mass in the same cathedral.

On the journey to Jerusalem, Count Dom Henrique would no doubt have introduced Arnaldo to Godefroi de Bouillon. The count was obviously on very good terms with the princeps, seeing as how Godefroi entrusted him with holy relics such as the arm of Saint James and the cloak of Mary Magdalene. What better way than for three knights, all far from their ancestral domiciles in Burgundy and Lorraine, to spend an afternoon discussing matters of common interest, such as the improvement of the human condition, the importance of faith, and the reconquering of lands and holy places usurped by infidels. It only requires a tiny leap of imagination to see that close bonds were established between the three men, and given the intricate family ties then existing within the French nobility, it is even conceivable all three may have been related.

Arnaldo’s presence in Jerusalem was very opportune, for he arrived at the moment Godefroi de Bouillon was installing members of the Ordre de Sion in the rebuilt abbey on its namesake hill. To say he made a favorable impression on the monks is an understatement, because by 1116 Pedro Arnaldo resurfaces as a full member of the Ordre, his signature inscribed on an original document from the abbey, in which he is addressed in Latin as Prior Petrus Arnaldus.⁷

Whether Prior Arnaldo became a member of the Ordre de Sion by being at the right place at the right time or whether he sailed with Count Dom Henrique with the intent to join the monks from Orval who constituted said brotherhood, we shall never know for sure, but the thread stitching all these people and events together is thick enough as to be beyond mere coincidence.

Such a position imbued Arnaldo with immense political leverage. The abbey established close ties with the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulcher right from the time both fraternities were installed by Godefroi de Bouillon. It therefore afforded its prior direct access to two people in particular—Hugues de Payns and Godefroi de Saint-Omer, the nucleus of the Order of the Temple. That relationship was revealed on July 19, 1116, when a document signed by both Prior Arnaldus and Hugues de Payns declares “good relations are assured between the two Orders.”⁸

In the relationship between the Order of the Temple, the House of Burgundy, the Ordre de Sion, and the incipient Portuguese kingdom, Arnaldo da Rocha would prove to be the lynchpin. He was Portuguese by birth. His friendship with Count Dom Henrique granted him favor within the Portuguese court and, through his family’s status, connections with the nobles and ecclesiasts in and around the city of Braga and the royal seat in Guimarães, many of whom were of Burgundian heritage.

But Portuguese chroniclers going back at least five centuries give Prior Arnaldo even more credit. They cite him as a key founder of the Knights Templar in Portugal, as well as one of the original Templars in Jerusalem: “Arnaldo da Rocha, who was a Templar knight, was one of the first nine originators of this illustrious Order of the Temple in Jerusalem,”⁹ wrote the historian Alexandre Ferreira in 1735, quoting an earlier seventeenth-century source, Manuel de Faria e Sousa.¹⁰ And Sousa would have been in an excellent position to state the facts, for not only did he study original documents in Braga—which places him in the perfect geographical location for source material—he was himself a Templar knight.^*8

Arnaldo da Rocha as one of the original Templars is both provocative and explosive, at the very least historically, because it brings into sharp focus an unsettling proposition: Were there really only nine original Templar knights? Or was this number merely a symbol, a talisman, the kind of flourish employed by secret societies throughout that period?

We may never know the truth for certain; however, an esteemed chronicler of the seventeenth century, the monk Bernardo de Brito, categorically stated in the Cistercian chronicles of Portugal that the original Templars consisted of “Hugues and Godefroi and nine other knights”¹¹ (emphasis added). This raises the original core group of proto-Templars to eleven.¹²

Did Brito misinterpret?

What would his motive have been?

To what end?

The point is worth considering. And so is this: throughout the ancient Mysteries schools, the number nine has represented the gnostic concept of utmost perfection. It is personified by the gestation period of the egg inside the female womb, a Holy Trinity to the power of three. In relation to our quest, there exists an arcane system of knowledge encoded within the Tarot, and although for most people the Tarot is nothing more than a set of decorative playing cards, in reality it is modeled on Kaballah, an ancient system of knowledge whose ideology is enshrined within most pagan and esoteric societies from remote times to the Middle Ages, and into the eighteenth century through speculative Freemasonry and its 33 degrees of initiation.

To the point, the ninth card in the deck of the Tarot is The Hermit. And as we have already seen, it was a hermit named Peter who, with a group of monks addressing themselves as the Ordre de Sion, traveled to Orval, home of Godefroi de Bouillon, the protector of the Holy Sepulcher, who subsequently installed this fraternity in the abbey he rebuilt atop Mount Sion.

The Hermit card.

And by 1116 the head of this organization is a Portuguese prior and friend of Hugues de Payns, the emerging Grand Master of a group of knights soon to be known as the Knights Templar.