Knights Templar before the council of Troyes?!!

As I understan before the Council of Troye Templars were small religious group of 9 members (2 of them were monks) led by Hugues de Payens. They sweared to protect the pilgrims but never took a part in any fight against muslims. They searched for something in the ruins of Salamons temple and after about nine years returned to France, where in the city Troyes were held a council and Templars were formed as a military order. By the way, in the preamble of Templar statutes were written that the great work is done.
Any idea of what did they found there?

"Holy Blood, Holy Grail"

this you might find interesting


www.templarhistory.com...

holy blood, holy grail is a horribly inaccurate book that makes nothing but assumptions.

You want information on Templars read "Dungeon Fire and Sword" by John Robinson.

Here you go,

1090 - 1188 The Ordre de Sion

According to the "prieure documents," a conclave of Calabrian monks who left from the Belgian Abbey of Orval in 1090 helped secure the election of Godfroi de Bouillion as de facto king of Jerusalem during the First Crusade (but as is well known, he refused the title, accepting only Defender of the Holy Sepulchre), based on their belief that he was a descendant of the Merovingians, and by that fact, according to these documents, also a descendant of King David through Jesus and Merovech. In return, Godfroi secured their installation into an Abbey on Mount Sion. These documents also claim that the Ordre of Sion and the Order of the Temple (officially, the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, later known as the Knights Templar, and officially recognized as such in 1118) were, until 1188, one unified organization with the same leadership.

www.fiu.edu...


Tututkamen

"The Da Vinci Code"said they were finding Holy Grail

from ch.37

"The Priory of Sion," he began, "was founded in Jerusalem in 1099 by a French king named
Godefroi de Bouillon, immediately after he had conquered the city."
Sophie nodded, her eyes riveted on him.
"King Godefroi was allegedly the possessor of a powerful secret� a secret that had been in
his family since the time of Christ. Fearing his secret might be lost when he died, he founded a
secret brotherhood� the Priory of Sion� and charged them with protecting his secret by quietly
passing it on from generation to generation. During their years in Jerusalem, the Priory learned
of a stash of hidden documents buried beneath the ruins of Herod's temple, which had been built
atop the earlier ruins of Solomon's Temple. These documents, they believed, corroborated
Godefroi's powerful secret and were so explosive in nature that the Church would stop at nothing
to get them." Sophie looked uncertain.
"The Priory vowed that no matter how long it took, these documents must be recovered
from the rubble beneath the temple and protected forever, so the truth would never die. In order
to retrieve the documents from within the ruins, the Priory created a military arm� a group of
nine knights called the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon."
Langdon paused. "More commonly known as the Knights Templar."
Sophie glanced up with a surprised look of recognition. Langdon had lectured often enough
on the Knights Templar to know that almost everyone on earth had heard of them, at least
abstractedly. For academics, the Templars' history was a precarious world where fact, lore, and
misinformation had become so intertwined that extracting a pristine truth was almost impossible.
Nowadays, Langdon hesitated even to mention the Knights Templar while lecturing because it
invariably led to a barrage of convoluted inquiries into assorted conspiracy theories.
Sophie already looked troubled. "You're saying the Knights Templar were founded by the
Priory of Sion to retrieve a collection of secret documents? I thought the Templars were created
to protect the Holy Land."
"A common misconception. The idea of protection of pilgrims was the guise under which
the Templars ran their mission. Their true goal in the Holy Land was to retrieve the documents
from beneath the ruins of the temple."
"And did they find them?"
Langdon grinned. "Nobody knows for sure, but the one thing on which all academics agree
is this: The Knights discovered something down there in the ruins... something that made them
wealthy and powerful beyond anyone's wildest imagination."
Langdon quickly gave Sophie the standard academic sketch of the accepted Knights
Templar history, explaining how the Knights were in the Holy Land during the Second Crusade
and told King Baldwin II that they were there to protect Christian pilgrims on the roadways.
Although unpaid and sworn to poverty, the Knights told the king they required basic shelter and
requested his permission to take up residence in the stables under the ruins of the temple. King
Baldwin granted the soldiers' request, and the Knights took up their meager residence inside the
devastated shrine.
The odd choice of lodging, Langdon explained, had been anything but random. The Knights
believed the documents the Priory sought were buried deep under the ruins� beneath the Holy of
Holies, a sacred chamber where God Himself was believed to reside. Literally, the very center of
the Jewish faith. For almost a decade, the nine Knights lived in the ruins, excavating in total
secrecy through solid rock.
Sophie looked over. "And you said they discovered something?"
"They certainly did," Langdon said, explaining how it had taken nine years, but the Knights
had finally found what they had been searching for. They took the treasure from the temple and
traveled to Europe, where their influence seemed to solidify overnight.
Nobody was certain whether the Knights had blackmailed the Vatican or whether the
Church simply tried to buy the Knights' silence, but Pope Innocent II immediately issued an
unprecedented papal bull that afforded the Knights Templar limitless power and declared them
"a law unto themselves"� an autonomous army independent of all interference from kings and
prelates, both religious and political.
With their new carte blanche from the Vatican, the Knights Templar expanded at a
staggering rate, both in numbers and political force, amassing vast estates in over a dozen
countries. They began extending credit to bankrupt royals and charging interest in return, thereby
establishing modern banking and broadening their wealth and influence still further.
By the 1300s, the Vatican sanction had helped the Knights amass so much power that Pope
Clement V decided that something had to be done. Working in concert with France's King
Philippe IV, the Pope devised an ingeniously planned sting operation to quash the Templars and
seize their treasure, thus taking control of the secrets held over the Vatican. In a military
maneuver worthy of the CIA, Pope Clement issued secret sealed orders to be opened
simultaneously by his soldiers all across Europe on Friday, October 13 of 1307.
At dawn on the thirteenth, the documents were unsealed and their appalling contents
revealed. Clement's letter claimed that God had visited him in a vision and warned him that the
Knights Templar were heretics guilty of devil worship, homosexuality, defiling the cross,
sodomy, and other blasphemous behavior. Pope Clement had been asked by God to cleanse the
earth by rounding up all the Knights and torturing them until they confessed their crimes against
God. Clement's Machiavellian operation came off with clockwork precision. On that day,
countless Knights were captured, tortured mercilessly, and finally burned at the stake as heretics.
Echoes of the tragedy still resonated in modern culture; to this day, Friday the thirteenth was
considered unlucky.
Sophie looked confused. "The Knights Templar were obliterated? I thought fraternities of
Templars still exist today?"
"They do, under a variety of names. Despite Clement's false charges and best efforts to
eradicate them, the Knights had powerful allies, and some managed to escape the Vatican
purges. The Templars' potent treasure trove of documents, which had apparently been their
source of power, was Clement's true objective, but it slipped through his fingers. The documents
had long since been entrusted to the Templars' shadowy architects, the Priory of Sion, whose veil
of secrecy had kept them safely out of range of the Vatican's onslaught. As the Vatican closed in,
the Priory smuggled their documents from a Paris preceptory by night onto Templar ships in La
Rochelle."
"Where did the documents go?"
Langdon shrugged. "That mystery's answer is known only to the Priory of Sion. Because
the documents remain the source of constant investigation and speculation even today, they are
believed to have been moved and rehidden several times. Current speculation places the
documents somewhere in the United Kingdom."
Sophie looked uneasy.
"For a thousand years," Langdon continued, "legends of this secret have been passed on.
The entire collection of documents, its power, and the secret it reveals have become known by a
single name� Sangreal. Hundreds of books have been written about it, and few mysteries have
caused as much interest among historians as the Sangreal."
"The Sangreal? Does the word have anything to do with the French word sang or Spanish
sangre� meaning 'blood'?"
Langdon nodded. Blood was the backbone of the Sangreal, and yet not in the way Sophie
probably imagined. "The legend is complicated, but the important thing to remember is that the
Priory guards the proof, and is purportedly awaiting the right moment in history to reveal the
truth."
"What truth? What secret could possibly be that powerful?"
Langdon took a deep breath and gazed out at the underbelly of Paris leering in the shadows.
"Sophie, the word Sangreal is an ancient word. It has evolved over the years into another term...
a more modern name." He paused. "When I tell you its modern name, you'll realize you already
know a lot about it. In fact, almost everyone on earth has heard the story of the Sangreal."
Sophie looked skeptical. "I've never heard of it."
"Sure you have." Langdon smiled. "You're just used to hearing it called by the name 'Holy
Grail.' "

and anybody can tell me where Troyes is??

[Edited on 17-4-2004 by Alchemist]

On Christmas Day 1148, in the Holy Sepulchre and while in the presence of Derrick of Alsace and his wife Sybilla of Anjou, the Templars would have found the Precious Blood of Christ. They poored it respectfully into an octagonal vial and sealed the ends with two golden roses. Sybilla had been infected with leprosy, like some of the Templars that were with her, and was suffering from a heavy fever. But when she held the relic in her hands, she had a vision in which she saw Bruges as "a New Jerusalem of the West"... and she cured miraculously, as did all the lepers surrounding her. Sybilla made a solemn plegde to turn Bruges into this New Jerusalem, a Holy City.

Full story here: The Holy Blood of Bruges, a New Jerusalem