Fantastic Metropolis

Wheels within wheels: the Albigensian Crusade moves from an attempt to suppress heresy into a carefully calculated effort on the part of Philip II Augustus to open a second front on the war against the Plantagenets—and a stunningly successful war at that: the Capetians would move from being barely in control of a small ring of influence around Paris and Orleans to ultimately controlling all of the Plantagenet lands in Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Poitou, as well as formely independent Provence and Languedoc, which, as we’ve just seen, was under the control of the Saint Gilles family, which began our saga as allies to Stephen of Blois but, through marriage, ended up allied to the descendants of his cousin and rival Matilda, Plantagenet in all but name. And so, we now have an exact inversion of the usual myth wherein the Knights Templar supported and protected the Cathars: instead, by the marriage of the Plantagenets who wouldn’t even have existed if not for early Templar meddler Hugh de Payens, a close ally to Bernard of Clairvaux, we see Raymond VII, of a family formerly quite tolerant of the Cathars, turning against them in favor of his blood ties to Henry III, who at that very moment was engaged in a battle with Simon de Montfort the Younger, who was as well married to a Plantagenet (Eleanor, Henry III’s sister) and was governor of Gascony. Simon would eventually take part in the Baronial revolt, reject the arbitration of Louis IX of France, and seize Henry and his son Edward (infamous to us now as the Longshanks, villain of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and a man quite fond of ruthless and bloody executions to quell rebellion) at the battle of Lewes in 1264. Interestingly enough, de Montfort the Younger would also end up dead on the heels of his greatest triumph, when, like his father, he looked to have dispossessed a ruler in his own demesne: he was dead a year later as Henry escaped him and the Lord Edward defeated him.

While it is generally held in conspiratorially-minded circles that the Knights Templar were allies with the Cathars, that tends to be fairly easily disproved, at least before 1314: the Templars were founded by men like Hugh de Champagne and Hugh de Payens, with the assistance of that most fervent preacher of crusades and anti-Cathar agitator, Bernard of Clairvaux; furthermore, the Templars possessed estates throughout what would become southern France after the Albigensian Crusade expanded Capetian power, and could easily have taken arms against Simon de Montfort. As we’ve seen, the nobles of Languedoc held out against de Montfort and his successors, the Dominicans, for over a century before the final fall of the last Cathar strongholds. If the Templars themselves had been even sympathetic to the Cathars, they could well have stood alongside them. Instead, they did nothing at best, and at worst they actively aided in their suppression. It seems likely that they saw opportunity for themselves in the elimination of the Cathar heresy, especially if in part it echoed information they’d liberated in combat with the Isma’ili-descended Hashishin in Jerusalem proper.

What Gerbert might have discovered and Honorius codified in his Grimoire (be it sorcery, study of ancient Manichæan-descended gnostic doctrines with a Kabbalistic bent, the arcane and astronomical mathematics of al-jabr, or possibly all three, a derived understanding of the ancient hermetic doctrine of “as above, so below,” independent of whether or not the “above” refers to the stars as studied by the astrolabe, the true nature of God as derived from Adam Kadmon through the worlds of united thought and essence, or both) would have been derived in part through the ancient Zoroastrian magi and transferred by Islamic scholars and scribes (and possibly magi themselves infecting the Isma’ili, the Druze and other such sects) through North Africa into al-’Andalus could also have been discovered in Jerusalem itself. Jerusalem, the home of the Dome of the Rock, the first of the Qibla and, before Mecca, the place where the prayers of all Muslims were directed… those self-same prayers that now seek out the Kaaba, the stone fallen from heaven, the el-Hajarul Aswad. Those of us who consider that the Holy Grail itself, the lapsit ex caelis, is also a rock fallen from Heaven, consider then the Dome of the Rock, and then the Kaaba (legendarily built by Abraham, that supposed master of the Kabbalah and first to make the covenant with Yahweh, who would first become the only god of the Jews and then, after Jeremiah, the One God), begin to wonder about what the crusaders might really have been fighting over. What about the Holy City that has three religions tangled up in it, has seen many die over it, and so affected Raymond Saint Gilles of Toulouse and Stephen of Blois and Baldwin and Fulk of Anjou and Hugh of Champagne and Hugh de Payens and William IX of Aquitaine and their various descendants that they became entangled in a complicated array of alliances and oppositions (and we remember that opposition is surest friendship) that would last for hundreds of years? Why would Abraham leave Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh itself, Ur of the Chaldees which the Greeks considered synonymous with astrology itself (so that the word Chaldean meant astrologer to them) and travel to the future site of Mecca to create the Kaaba around a fragment of rock fallen from the sky? Why would his descendants create the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem around a similar fragment of star-fallen stone?