13. After the Knights Templar was Founded, They Disappeared for Several Years
So Hugues de Payens gets the blessing of Bernard of Clairvaux to form a monastic order that would protect pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem. He develops a ragtag band of nine knights, who travel to the Holy Land and set up camp at the Temple Mount. And then, nothing. For the next seven or eight years, the historical record is silent as to what was happening among the Templars. Numerous theories abound, but the organization was unusually secretive, so we can’t really know what happened.
Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, believes that they found documents relating to the holy bloodline of Jesus Christ through Mary Magdalene. This theory, however, has widely been certified as false. Some believe that they were looking for treasure, particularly relics. After all, the Temple Mount is sacred to three major religions, and some think that it has peculiar energy or power connected with it. Others believe that they were doing what they claimed they set out to do: help protect Christian pilgrims who were traveling to Jerusalem. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence to support many different ideas; in fact, there is such a profound lack of proof that what does exist could be taken to help just about any theory except for Dan Brown’s.