Paris. March the eighteenth, 1314.
The River Seine runs cold beneath a steel grey sky, and on a small island in the middle of the river, a crowd has gathered to watch a man die. His name is Jacques de Molay and he’s sixty years old. He’s been a prisoner for seven years, but today, by order of King Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V, it’s his turn.
A man offers a flame up to the wood and it lights, the smoke starts to rise. But before the flames reach him — before the roar of the fire swallows everything — de Molay does something no one expects. He speaks. His voice loud and clear, booms over the jeering crowd, over the crackling wood, issuing a curse. He calls both the King and the Pope to stand before God and answer for what they have done — within the year.
The crowd laughs as the fire roars higher—thinking these are just words of a dying man. And they’re right, as and silently de Moley slips from this life.
But, then it happens. Pope Clement V is dead within the month, and King Philip IV — forty-six years old, apparently in perfect health — dies a few months later.
But here’s the bit the story books often miss. While Jacques de Molay’s body turned to ash on that island in the Seine, the order he had given his life to — the order that kings and popes had conspired to destroy — didn’t die with him. They lived on somewhere else, and with that, I suppose, so did he… and today we’re going to find out where…
Jerusalem, around 1119 AD.
To find out what happened next, we have to go back to the beginning.
The First Crusade had ended twenty years earlier, and the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem was drawing thousands of pilgrims from across Europe. They came on foot, by horse, by boat — desperate to walk where Christ had. But the roads to the holy city were brutal, pilgrims often robbed, killed, and left for the wolves.
Seeing this chaos, nine men made a vow to protect those on the road to Jerusalem. They called themselves the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, but because that’s really long name, everyone else called them the Knights Templar.
King Baldwin II of Jerusalem gave them lodgings in a wing of the royal palace — built, it was believed, on the foundations of Solomon’s Temple itself. To start with these nine men had almost nothing—no lane, no resources, just a vow and a mission.
But in 1129, something changed everything. Pope Honorius II gave them official recognition— the first military order ever to receive papal backing. Suddenly, people were interested, they got donations of money, land, horses, and people wanting to join.
Ten years later in 1139, Pope Innocent II went even further — issuing a papal bull that exempted the Templars from all local laws. They could now cross any border freely, didn’t pay any taxes, and answers only to the Pope himself.
Overnight they became untouchable.
Within a century of those nine men making their vow, the Templars had built a network of nearly a thousand commanderies and fortifications stretching from Scotland to the Holy Land. They had become, in just a few generations, one of the most powerful organizations in the medieval world.
The bankers of the crusades
But here’s what most people don’t know about the Templars. Yes, they were warriors, but the majority of their vast organization wasn’t military at all, it was financial. The Templars essentially invented modern banking.
They did this to solve a problem faced by every medieval pilgrim. Say you wanted to travel from England to Jerusalem — a journey of months, through dangerous territory. If you carry your gold, you risk being robbed on the way. If you don’t carry it, you’ll starve and won’t get very far at all.
The Templars solved this with brilliant simplicity. Their system allowed pilgrims to deposit their gold at a Templar house in their home country, then receive a letter confirming the deposit. The pilgrim could then travel safely with nothing of value, then present the letter in Jerusalem, and collect equivalent funds.
A traveler’s cheque, just in the twelfth century.
But it didn’t stop there, the Templars offered current accounts, international money transfers, and loans to individuals and rulers alike. By the thirteenth century, the kings of France were storing their entire royal treasury with the order.
Individual knights took strict vows of poverty. But the order itself? The order was almost incomprehensibly wealthy.
And that wealth made them powerful. And that power made them enemies.
Friday the thirteenth
In 1291, the last Crusader stronghold — the city of Acre — fell to the Mamluks and the Templars were expelled from the Holy Land entirely. And suddenly, well without the Holy Land, they had nothing to do.
They retreated to Cyprus. They were still rich and powerful, but without a clear mission, which was something European rulers grew uneasy about. And one man disliked this more than most, King Philip IV of France.
Philip — known as Philip the Fair, for his looks, not his character — had a problem. He had borrowed enormous sums from the Templars to fund his wars. He had ever tried and failed to become Grand Master of the order himself.
He also had the new Pope — Clement V — who was so under his influence that the papacy had literally been relocated from Rome to Avignon in France. So, with the motive and the means, King Philip made his move
On the morning of Friday the thirteenth of October 1307 — a date that has haunted Western culture ever since — Philip’s agents executed a single, simultaneous, arrest across the entire country. In one dawn sweep, virtually every Templar in France was taken into custody.
The charges were devastating: heresy, blasphemy, worshipping a mysterious idol called Baphomet, spitting on the cross, and performing obscene rituals at initiation ceremonies. Under torture, many knights confessed to anything and everything.
But really what Philip wanted was the treasure. The Templars were wealthy as we know, and Philip had expected, when he raided their commanderies, to take this wealth with him. But he found nothing. He didn’t get his hands on a single coin or relic, despite searching every property they owned in France.
Then in 1312, the pope officially dissolved the order. The Knights Templar — two centuries in the making, a global superpower of faith and finance — were gone.
Or so people believe.
The Secret of Portugal
That’s the official story, anyway. But now I’ll let you into a secret… The Templars knew what King Philip was planning. And before he struck, they moved all the treasure somewhere else. Some say, it went to Switzerland, others say it ended up in Scotland, but I think they went south, to Portugal… and here’s why.
King Dinis I of Portugal had long been a supporter of the Templars and rather than arrest them as King Philip had asked him too, he did something super clever. He renamed them.
With one simple direction Templars became the Order of Christ. They were the same knights with the same knowledge and wealth, just marching under a different badge.
When I was writing The Templar Enigma, this was the moment in my research that made me sit back and think: this is brilliant. The most hunted military order in Europe just… walked across a border, changed their name, and carried on.
The Order of Christ didn’t fade into obscurity either, they went on to shape the modern world.
Vasco da Gama — the explorer who opened the sea route to India — sailed under the red cross of the Order of Christ. Prince Henry the Navigator, who launched Portugal’s entire age of exploration was a member of the Order of Christ. Even Christopher Columbus, who married into a Portuguese noble family with deep connections to the order, may have had links to the Templar successors.
The knights who were supposed to have been destroyed in 1312 had bankrolled the discovery of the modern world.
You can see this still in Portugal today as in the twelfth century, as they Templars helped the young Christian kingdom push back against centuries of Moorish rule, they built an entire network of fortresses. Each especially designed to watch a valley, control a river crossing, or hold ground in a kingdom that was still being won inch by inch.
There’s one place where this is most obvious—Tomar. Construction began on the castle and convent there in 1160 — and it has survived, almost intact, for over eight hundred years. The Convento de Cristo is a UNESCO World Heritage Site now, and at the heart of it is the Charola. This round church, supposedly modelled on Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, is designed in such a way that knights could attend mass on horseback.
The nearby castle of Almourol is particularly awe inspiring. Rising out of the Tagus River, it was designed to control the river. There are suggestions that this was more than a military post, though, and that some of that treasure may have passed through here.
So, when Philip of France outlawed the Templars, King Dinis of Portugal looked at all of this. He considered the castles, the fortresses, and the knowledge the Templars had given his country. That’s why he refused to prosecute Templars, welcoming them along with their wealth, nautical, cartographic and astronomical knowledge.
The Initiation Wells
Nestled in the hills near Sintra — a UNESCO World Heritage town of fairy-tale palaces just west of Lisbon — lies an estate called Quinta da Regaleira.
It was built in the early twentieth century by a wealthy Portuguese eccentric named António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro, a man obsessed with esotericism, Freemasonry, and the Knights Templar.
Now while the estate was built in the twentieth century and is filled with hidden symbols, it’s the underground tunnels, grottoes, and — most remarkably — two extraordinary wells that spiral deep into the earth, that interest me.
Looking at the wells and tunnels that stretch beneath the estate, I wonder if they were already there when Monterio built his palace.
Now these wells were never used for water. They were built purely for ritual and symbolic purposes. Their spiral staircases descend through nine landings — representing, it is believed, Dante’s nine circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Secret tunnels connect the wells to grottoes and the palace above.
Whether this could lead to more, or if there’s a hidden meaning the codes and carvings around the estate, I don’t know. It could, after all, just be the obsession of a very rich man. But standing at the bottom of that Initiation Well, looking up at the spiral staircase, the stone carved with crosses and astrological symbols, the light barely reaching you from far above — I felt something down there.
And knowing that you’re moving in the footsteps of the templars. Well that seems like a coincidence to me.
It’s the place where my novel the Templar Enigma, the fifth book in the Eden Black archeological thriller series reaches its climax. And having stood there myself during my research trip, I can tell you — the book doesn’t exaggerate.
Come with us to Portugal
Everything you’ve just heard — the curse of Jacques de Molay , the fortress at Tomar, the island castle at Almourol, the spiral wells descending into the earth at Quinta da Regaleira — I’ve stood in all of those places. I’ve felt what Eden feels in those pages. And for a long time, that was just mine.
But now, for the first time, I’m inviting you to come too.
On the sixth of October 2026, I’m taking a small group — fewer than ten people — to Portugal. We’re walking the Templar fortress at Tomar, crossing the water to Almourol Castle, and descending into the Initiation Wells at Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra. The exact places that are in this podcast. The exact places that are in the book.
This isn’t a bus tour. It’s an adventure. A small group of readers, following in Eden’s footsteps, in the places where the Templars actually lived and hid and survived.
There are very few spots — and I’d love for you to be one of them. All the details are in the show notes.
The Templar Enigma
Here’s what my book, the Templar Enigma, is all about:
A TEMPLAR CURSE
AN ANCIENT PROPHECY
A PULSE-POUNDING RACE AGAINST TIME
In 1314, Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master uttered a curse as he burned at the stake. Within months, both men responsible for his downfall, the King of France, and the Pope, lay dead.
Centuries later, a Templar descendant discovers the key to unleashing the curse’s power: The legendary Seal of Solomon. Learning of the relic’s power, he plans a cataclysmic event which will return civilization to the Dark Ages.
Enter Eden Black. As the countdown begins, Eden is thrust into a web of intrigue that spans centuries, from the final days of the Knights Templar to the shadowy activities of a modern secret society.
But, learning just how deep this conspiracy goes, and who exactly is involved, Eden realizes things are much more deadly that she first thought.
From the crypt of a long-dead templar knight, to the shifting sands of the Sahara, and on to the palaces of Portugal, she uncovers shocking truths about her own destiny and the role she must play in the coming apocalypse.
