Holy Blood, Holy Grail (38 page)

Four years later Childeric died, and Pepin’s claim to the throne was undisputed.”

A year before a crucial document had conveniently made its appearance, which subsequently altered the course of Western history. This document was called the “Donation of Constantine’. Today there is no question that it was a forgery, concocted and not very skilfully within the papal

Chancery. At the time, however, it was deemed genuine, and its influence was enormous.

The “Donation of Constantine’ purported to date from Constantine’s alleged conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312. According to the

“Donation’,

Constantine had officially given to the bishop of Rome his imperial symbols and regalia, which thus became the Church’s property.

- 262 -

The “Donation’ further alleged that Constantine, for the first time, had declared the bishop of Rome to be “Vicar of Christ’ and offered him the status of emperor. In his capacity as “Vicar of Christ’ the bishop had supposedly returned the imperial regalia to Constantine, who wore them subsequently with ecclesiastical sanction and permission more or less in the manner of a loan.

The implications of this document are clear enough. According to the

“Donation of Constantine’, the bishop of Rome exercised supreme secular as well as supreme spiritual authority over Christendom. He was, in effect, a papal emperor, who could dispose as he wished of the imperial crown, who could delegate his power or any aspect thereof as he saw fit. In other words he possessed, through Christ, the un challengeable right to create or depose kings. It is from the “Donation of Constantine’ that the subsequent power of the Vatican in secular affairs ultimately derives.

Claiming authority from the “Donation of Constantine’, the Church deployed its influence on behalf of Pepin III. It devised a ceremony whereby the blood of usurpers, or anyone else for that matter, could be made sacred.

This ceremony came to be known as coronation and anointment as those terms were understood during the Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance.

At Pepin’s coronation, bishops for the first time were authorised to attend, with rank equal to that of secular nobles. And the coronation itself no longer entailed the recognition of a king, or a pact with a king.

It now consisted of nothing less than the creation of a king.

The ritual of anointment was similarly transformed. In the past, when practised at all, it was a ceremonial accoutrement an act of recognition and ratification. Now, however, it assumed a new significance. Now it took precedence over blood, and could “magically’, as it were, sanctify blood.

Anointment became something more than a symbolic gesture. It became the literal act whereby divine grace was conferred upon a ruler. And the pope, by performing this act, became supreme mediator between God and kings.

Through the ritual of anointment, the Church arrogated to itself the right to make kings. Blood was now subordinate to oil. And all

- 263 -

monarchs were rendered ultimately subordinate, and subservient, to the pope.

In 754 Pepin III was officially anointed at Ponthion, thus inaugurating the

Carolingian dynasty. The name derives from Charles Martel, although it is generally associated with the most famous of Carolingian rulers, Charles the Great, Carolus Magnus or, as he is best known, Charlemagne.

And in 800

Charlemagne was proclaimed Holy Roman Emperor a title which, by virtue of the pact with Clovis three centuries before, should have been reserved exclusively for the Merovingian bloodline. Rome now became the seat of an empire that embraced the whole of Western Europe, whose rulers ruled only with the sanction of the pope.

In 496 the Church had pledged itself in perpetuity to the Merovingian bloodline. In sanctioning the assassination of Dagobei’t, in devising the ceremonies of coronation and anointment, in endorsing Pepin’s claim to the throne, it had clandestinely betrayed its pact.

In crowning Charlemagne it had made its betrayal not only public, but a fait accompli. In the words of one modern authority:

We cannot therefore be sure that the anointing with chrism of the Carolingians was intended to compensate for the loss of magical properties of the blood symbolised by long hair. If it compensated for anything, it was probably for loss of faith incurred in breaking an oath of fidelity in a particularly shocking way.zz

And again, “Rome showed the way by providing in unction a king-making rite that somehow cleared the consciences of “all the Franks”. ‘23

Not all consciences, however. The usurpers themselves seem to have felt, if not a sense of guilt, at least an acute need to establish their legitimacy.

To this end Pepin III, immediately before his anointment, had ostentatiously married a Merovingian princess. And Charlemagne did likewise.

Charlemagne, moreover, seems to have been painfully aware of the betrayal involved in his coronation. According to contemporary accounts, the coronation was a carefully stage-managed affair, engineered by the pope behind the Frankish monarch’s back; and Charlemagne appears to have been both surprised and profoundly

- 264 -

embarrassed. A crown of some sort had already been clandestinely prepared.

Charlemagne had been lured to Rome and there persuaded to attend a special mass. When he took his place in the church, the pope, without warning, placed a crown upon his head, while the populace acclaimed him as “Charles,

Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-loving emperor of the Romans’.

In the words of a chronicler writing at the time, Charlemagne “made it clear that he would not have entered the Cathedral that day at all, although it was the greatest of all festivals of the Church, if he had known in advance what the Pope was planning to do. ‘24

But whatever Charlemagne’s responsibility in the affair, the pact with

Clovis and the Merovingian bloodline had been shamelessly betrayed.

And all our inquiries indicated that this betrayal, even though it occurred more than 1100 years ago, continued to rankle for the Prieure de Sion. Mathieu

Paoli, the independent researcher quoted in the preceding chapter, reached a similar conclusion:

For them [the Prieure de Sion], the only authentic nobility is the nobility of Visigothic/Merovingian origin. The Carolingians, then all others, are but usurpers. In effect, they were but functionaries of the king, charged with administering lands who, after transmitting by heredity their right to govern these lands, then purely and simply seized power for themselves. In consecrating Charlemagne in the year 800, the Church perjured itself, for it had concluded, at the baptism of Clovis, an alliance with the

Merovingians which had made France the eldest daughter of the Church.”

The Exclusion of Dagobert II from History

With the murder of Dagobert II in 679 the Merovingian dynasty effectively ended. With the death of Childeric III in 755 the Merovingians seemed to vanish from the stage of world history completely. According to the “Prieure documents’, however, the Merovingian bloodline in fact survived. According to the “Prieure documents’, it was perpetuated to the present day, from the infant

- 265 -

Sigisbert IV Dagobert’s son by his second wife, Giselle de Razes.There is no question that Sigisbert existed and that he was Dagobert’s heir. According to all sources other than the

“Prieure documents’, however, it is unclear what happened to him. Certain chroniclers have tacitly assumed that he was murdered along with his father and other members of the royal family. One highly dubious account asserts that he died in a hunting accident a year or two before his father’s death. If that is true Sigisbert must have been a precocious hunter, for he cannot possibly have been much more than three years old at the time.

There is no record whatever of Sigisbert’s death. Nor is there any record apart from the evidence in the “Prieure documents’ of his survival. The whole issue seems to have been lost in “the mists of time’, and no one seems to have been much concerned about it except, of course, for the

Prieure de Sion. In any case Sion appeared to be privy to certain information which was not available elsewhere; or was deemed of too little consequence to warrant much investigation; or was deliberately suppressed.

It is hardly surprising that no account of Sigisbert’s fate has been filtered down to us. There was no publicly accessible account even of

Dagobert until the seventeenth century. At some point during the Middle

Ages a systematic attempt was apparently made to erase Dagobert from history, to deny that he ever existed. Today Dagobert II can be found in any encyclopedia. Until 1646, however, there was no acknowledgment whatever that he had ever lived.zs Any list or genealogy of French rulers compiled before 1646 simply omits him, jumping (despite the flagrant inconsistency) from Dagobert I to Dagobert III one of the last

Merovingian monarchs, who died in 715. And not until 1655 was Dagobert II reinstated in accepted lists of French kings. Given this process of eradication, we were not unduly astonished at the dearth of information relating to Sigisbert. And we could not but suspect that whatever information did exist had been deliberately suppressed.

But why, we wondered, should Dagobert II have been excised from history?

What was being concealed by such an excision? Why should one wish to deny the very existence of a man? One possibility, of course, is to negate thereby the existence of his heirs. If Dagobert never lived,

- 266 -

Sigisbert cannot have lived either. But why should it have been important, as late as the seventeenth century, to deny that Sigisbert had ever lived?

Unless he had indeed survived, and his descendants were still regarded as a threat.

It seemed to us that we were clearly dealing with some sort of ‘cover-up’.

Quite patently there were vested interests which had something of import to lose if knowledge of Sigisbert’s survival were made public. In the ninth century and perhaps as late as the Crusades, these interests would seem to have been the Roman Church and the French royal line. But why should the issue have continued to matter as late as the age of Louis XIV? It would surely have been an academic point by then, for three French dynasties had come and gone, while Protestantism had broken Roman hegemony.

Unless there was indeed something very special about the Merovingian blood. Not

‘magical properties’, but something else -something that retained its explosive potency even after superstitions about magical blood had fallen by the wayside.

Prince Guillem de Gellone, Comte de Razes

According to the “Prieure documents’, Sigisbert IV, on the death of his father, was rescued by his sister and smuggled southwards to the domain of his mother the Visigoth princess, Giselle de Razes. He is said to have arrived in the Languedoc in 681 and, at some point shortly thereafter, to have adopted or inherited his uncle’s titles, duke of Razes and count of

Rhedae. He is also said to have adopted the surname, or nickname, of “Plant-Ard’

(subsequently Plantard) from the appellation ‘rejeton ardent’ ‘ardently flowering shoot’ of the Merovingian vine. Under this name, and under the titles acquired from his uncle, he is said to have perpetuated his lineage. And by 886 one branch of that lineage is said to have culminated in a certain Bernard Plantavelu apparently derived from Plant-and or Plantard whose son became the first duke of Aquitaine.

As far as we could ascertain, no independent historian either confirmed

- 267 -

or disputed these assertions. The whole matter was simply ignored.But the circumstantial evidence argued persuasively that Sigisbert did indeed survive to perpetuate his lineage.

The assiduous eradication of Dagobert from history lends credence to this conclusion. By denying his existence, any line of descent from him would have been invalidated. This constitutes a motive for an otherwise inexplicable action. Among the other fragments of evidence is a charter, dated 718, which pertains to the foundation of a monastery a few miles from Rennes-leChateau by “Sigebert, Comte de Rhedae and his wife,

Magdala’.z’ Apart from this charter nothing is heard of the Rhedae or Razes titles for another century. When one of them reappears, however, it does so in an extremely interesting context.

By 742 there was an independent and fully autonomous state in the south of

France a princedom according to some accounts, a fully fledged kingdom according to others. Documentation is sketchy and history is vague about it most historians, in fact, are unaware of its existence but there is no question of its reality. It was officially recognised by Charlemagne and his successors, and by the caliph of Baghdad and the Islamic world.

It was grudgingly recognised by the Church, some of whose lands it confiscated.

And it survived until the late ninth century.

Sometime between 759 and 768 the ruler of this state -which included the

Razes and Rennes-leChateau was officially pronounced a king. Despite Rome’s disapprobation, he was recognised as such by the Carolingians, to whom he pledged himself as vassal. In existing accounts he figures most frequently under the name of Theodoric, or Thierry. And most modern scholars regard him as being of Merovingian descent .z8 There is no definitive evidence from where such descent might have derived. It might well have derived from Sigisbert. In any case, there is no question that by 790 Theodoric’s son, Guillem de Gellone, held the title of count of Razes the title Sigisbert is said to have possessed and passed on to his descendants.

Guillem de Gellone was one of the most famous men of his time, so much so, indeed, that his historical reality -like that of Charlemagne and Godfroi de Bouillon has been obscured by legend. Before the epoch of the

- 268 -

Crusades, there were at least six major epic poems composed about him, chansons de gqste similar to the famous Chanson de

Roland. In The Divine Comedy Dante accorded him a uniquely exalted status.