1307. October, Friday 13th. One man awaited his fate after damning himself and an international movement he had led for 16 years. Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, a mysterious, wealthy, Christian ... more »warrior group at the centre of the Crusades for almost 200 years, confessed to the crime of heresy. Why? How did de Molay and the Templars suddenly find themselves under attack from their oldest allies? Were they really heretics after all? The rise of the Knights Templar had been rapid, and their fall would be swift. In the blink of an eye, the considerable wealth the Templars had amassed was also to disappear, giving rise to myths that have shrouded the order ever since. And it begged the biggest question: what was the real purpose of the Knights Templar? Away from the celebrity glare of The Da Vinci Code, new light can now be shed on the Templars, based on new evidence. The truth starts to emerge about an idiosyncratic conglomerate of warrior-monks, ultimately leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: corporate greed was potentially the beginning and end of the story... Armed with the Chinon parchment - explosive new evidence from the Vatican which contains de Molay's startling confession - this film cuts a swathe through the peculiar, myriad myths surrounding the trial of the Templars. We are told almost a century after their formation that the Order was created as a bodyguard for Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. But initially,there were only nine of them. Why were the new knights housed in pride of place at the most holy site in the world? What was their real role?With the aid of international experts in England, Israel and Rome, the programme argues that the Knights Templar were created for an entirely different purpose; one that would eventually haunt them to the grave. We suggest that their more secretive and corporate desire for assets may have been on behalf of the Vatican, and that this is what led to their enormous wealth, their home at the Temple Mount, their Papal favouritism, the tunnels under Temple Mount and their legendary links to the Holy Grail and the Turin Shroud. The Knights Templar were the creators of the world's first international bank. And we will argue that they might have been digging under their first base for what would have provided the biggest capital deposit: Solomon's Treasure, allegedly buried right beneath the Order's first home...Were the Templars simply stitched-up in a phoney trial, or were they really heretics? The King of France mounted a corporate raid on the Templars, and forced the Pope to challenge their legitimacy by accusing them of heresy. The ensuing trial was therefore politically convenient: discredit the board , snatch the corporation, strip the assets. Trumped-up charges led to neat confessions obtained through torture. Open and shut case. But were all the charges false..? Until recently the Vatican's best-kept secret, The Chinon Parchment is the ultimate body-blow to the Templars: confessions of ritualised homosexual intimacy, spitting on the cross, denouncing Christ and a formal recommendation of sodomy as preferable to heterosexual relations. Ultimately, the end of the Crusades had left the unemployed Knights Templar vulnerable to take-over. To execute the plan, the bankrupt King of France only needed a little help from a weak Pope - and the Knights Templar, unwittingly forging their own destruction. A destruction that was as psychopathic and gruesome as it was effective...« less
