Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [57]
“Signer Casaubon told me about it recently, and I was struck by the fact that there was no resistance to the arrest, and the knights were caught by surprise.’’
The colonel smiled condescendingly. “True. But it’s absurd to think that men powerful enough to frighten the king of France would have been unable to find out that a few rogues were stirring up the king and that the king was stirring up the pope. Quite absurd! Which suggests that there had to be a plan. A sublime plan. Suppose the Templars had a plan to conquer the world, and they knew the secret of an immense source of power, a secret whose preservation was worth the sacrifice of the whole Temple quarter in Paris, and of the commanderies scattered throughout the kingdom, also in Spain, Portugal, England, and Italy, the castles in the Holy Land, the monetary wealth— everything. Philip the Fair suspected this. Why else would he have unleashed a persecution that discredited the fair flower of French chivalry? The Temple realized that the king suspected and that he would attempt its destruction. Direct resistance was futile; the plan required time: either the treasure (or whatever it was) had to be found, or it had to be exploited slowly. And the Temple’s secret directorate, whose existence everyone now recognizes...”
“Everyone?”
“Of course. It’s inconceivable that such a powerful order could have survived so long without having a secret directorate.”
“Your reasoning is flawless,” Belbo said, giving me a sidelong glance.
The colonel went on. “The grand master belonged to the secret directorate, but he must have served only as its cover, to deceive outsiders. In La Chevalerie et les aspects secrets de I’histoire, Gaulthier Walther says that the Templar plan for world conquest was to be finally realized only in the year 2000. The Temple decided to go underground, and that meant that it had to look as if the order were dead. They sacrificed themselves, that’s what they did! The grand master included. Some let themselves be killed; they were probably chosen by lot. Others submitted, blending into the civilian landscape. What became of the minor officials, the lay brothers, the carpenters, the glaziers? That was how the Freemasons were bom, later spreading throughout the world, as everyone knows. But hi England things happened differently. The king resisted the pope’s pressure and pensioned the Templars off. They lived out their days meekly, in the order’s great houses. Meekly—do you believe that? I don’t. In Spain the order changed its name to the order of Montesa. Gentlemen, these were men who could bring a king to heel; they held so many of his promissory notes that they could have bankrupted him in a week. The king of Portugal, for instance, came to terms. Let us handle it like this, dear friends, he said: don’t call yourselves Knights of the Temple anymore; change the name to Knights of Christ, and I’ll be happy. In Germany there were very few trials. The abolition of the order was purely formal, and in any case there was a brother order, the Teutonic Knights, who at the time were not merely a state within the state: they were the state, having acquired a territory as big as those countries now under the Russian heel, and they kept expanding until the end of the fifteenth century, when the Mongols arrived. But that’s another story, because the Mongols are at our gates even now. But I mustn’t digress.”
“Yes, let us not digress,” Belbo said.
“Well then. As everyone knows, two days before Philip issued the arrest warrant, and a month