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1147. APRIL. BRAGA. THE MYSTERIOUS PRIOR ARNALDO IN HIS NEW ABODE . . .

The bill of sale for a riverside house outside the city, on the slopes of Mount Ferrocan, is from Dona Sancha Viegas and sons, given to “Petrus Arnaldo, a Friar of the Temple.”¹ No one earned this bucolic setting more than he.

Born in Santarém to the de la Roche family of Burgundy,² Arnaldo da Rocha sailed to Jerusalem with Count Dom Henrique to rendezvous with Godefroi de Bouillon, became prior of the Abbey de Notre Dame du Mont Sion, and continued as such well into the mid-1120s.³ He is credited as one of the founders of the Knights Templar in Jerusalem and with introducing them into Portugale.⁴

His name appears on two documents cosigned with Hugues de Payns expressing continuing cooperation between their respective organizations.⁵ At the express orders of the Grand Master himself, he returns to Portugale in 1125 bearing the additional title of Procurator,⁶ and together with four other Templar knights he is instructed to create a home for the Order and “establish a Portuguese crown.”⁷ This coincided with the Templars discovering something of monumental importance, which concluded their digs inside Temple Mount.

He is present at the start of the drive toward Portuguese independence, arranging properties and accepting donations on behalf of the Templars. Then, for the best part of thirty years, this man of obvious high rank and reputation takes a humble back seat to three successive Templar Masters in Portugal yet continues to work behind the scenes. Why should such an extraordinary individual remain virtually incognito during a nation’s formative years?

Frustratingly little documentation survives concerning this most influential of figures. Whenever Prior Arnaldo steps into the limelight he does so fleetingly, as though engaging in subtle diplomacy. Given how he presided over an equally mysterious and close-knit group secreted behind a fortified basilica on Mount Sion, perhaps it is hardly surprising he should have conducted his work in the same manner upon returning to his native country, the timing of which coincides with the knighting of Afonso Henriques at Zamora. (Was he present at the ceremony?)

Were Countess Tareja’s frantic renegotiations in granting the property of Souré to the Templars a mark of his influence? Paranoid sovereigns did not hand over territory and strategic castles unless they implicitly trusted the people with whom they were dealing, and Arnaldo, with established family ties in and around the Portuguese court, confidante of her late husband and relative of Bernard de Clairvaux, clearly was a man of unimpeachable reputation. If ever there was a diplomat so centrally placed between so many factions, Prior Arnaldo was the prime candidate, the central pillar of the entire operation.

There is a further point. The Templars were obviously involved in a geopolitical design, and as such, they would hardly publicize it openly. The influence of a foreign organization on sovereign soil, let alone the idea of nation-building, is a subtle affair; it is an exercise in forging friendships and invisible alliances. That French knights, Procurators, and Masters moved into Braga is one thing (given the Burgundian heritage of the Count of Portugale, this would hardly have raised eyebrows), but Arnaldo was Portuguese from a Burgundian family and a clergyman. The late Templar researcher André Paraschi was succinct on this hypothesis: “The installation in the country of the Order of the Templars needed to be a subtle affair, for it would have been a difficult task to achieve by anyone already invested with obvious authority such as a regional Master.”⁸

Paraschi goes on to suggest that Prior Arnaldo was the undocumented Templar Master in Portugal ever since their domicile was established in Braga, shortly after his return from Mount Sion in 1125: “He was the mastermind of the Order’s expansion and consolidation in the Peninsula . . . work which had to be done with patience and secrecy, far from the eyes of the profane world.”⁹

Arnaldo’s governance assumes a mysterious, transcendental cohesion not unfamiliar to anyone involved with esoteric movements.¹⁰ To all intents and purposes the figures he surrounded himself with were engaged in a theocratic democracy; even the actions of people recruited into the Templar Order suggests the brotherhood was guided as though by a ministerial college.

Shortly after Afonso Henriques donates the ecclesiastic properties of Santarém to the Templars, Arnaldo da Rocha once again comes back into the limelight and, acting as a Procurator of the Order, accepting and supervising large donations in this territory.¹¹ Then in 1157, upon the death of the Templar Master Hugh Martin, he finally—and it would seem, reluctantly—accepts the title of Master.¹²

But his tenure as the fourth Master of the Knights Templar in Portugal is brief, less than a year in fact, and he spends much of it grooming his successor, a knight he had known as a young man in Braga and who’d shared his adventures in Jerusalem—Gualdino Paes—as though the prior of Sion was steering this young knight on an important course of action.