The Lost Fortune of the Knights Templar

Over seven hundred years ago, a medieval religious order protected a vast treasure of gold, silver, precious gems, and religious relics… and then it all mysteriously vanished. For centuries, historians and fortune hunters have crossed continents searching for these ancient riches, which would be worth billions today. What happened to the secret hoard of the Knights Templar? Thank you to our experts who contributed to this episode: Cheryl H. White, Matthew Gabriele, Ammir Hussain, J. Stephen Roberts, Tony McMahon, Anthony Pinn, and Garth Baldwin. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow History’s Greatest Mysteries to never miss an episode! History’s Greatest Mysteries is a History Channel Original Podcast, brought to you by Rewind Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Rewind Studios Originals, Hidden History and Government That Doesn’t Suck, wherever you get your podcasts! Follow us on Social Instagram: @RewindStudios https://www.instagram.com/rewindstudiosTikTok: @RewindStudios https://www.tiktok.com/@rewindstudios See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And now a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Today, a vast treasure of gold and sacred relics held by a medieval religious order.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  The Knights Templar were the most charismatic, powerful order of warriors in the Middle Ages.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  They're alleged to have the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the piece of the True Cross, all this gold that they accumulated over a couple hundred years.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  But in 1307 AD, the Templar treasure mysteriously vanishes, or does it?

• 0:40Speaker 03

  They fell so quickly and so spectacularly, and we don't know what happened after that. Where did all the wealth go?

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Now we explore the top theories surrounding the Knights Templar and its secret horde.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  The place where they dig is called Oak Island.

• 0:57Speaker 04

  He says that he saw the Templars smuggle this treasure, and that it took 50 horses to move all of it.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  There was interest in Templar treasure from a very sinister source, the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  Does the Templar's treasure still exist? And if so, where is it? Welcome to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind Studios. Each episode, we take a deep dive into some of the greatest unanswered questions from history, backed by some of the foremost experts on the subject. Today, the lost treasure of the Knights Templar.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  November 1095, Pope Urban calls on all Christians to take up arms against Muslims who control the Holy Land.

• 1:56Speaker 05

  Christian armies set off on what's going to be the first of eight crusades. They marched through modern-day Turkey, Constantinople, and what is today Syria, Antioch.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  There was a massive response, probably about 100,000 people from all walks of life, mostly from the nobility but the poor, even churchmen left their monasteries in order to go on this holy war.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Pope Urban II wants to liberate the Holy Land. He wants to liberate Jerusalem and the most holy sites for Christians from Muslim rule.

• 2:27Speaker 05

  Then they set their sights on the holy city of Jerusalem.

• 2:32Speaker 05

  It involves a siege process that lasts about a month, and by July of 1099, they have breached the walls of Jerusalem itself.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  The Holy Land and all its famed sites are now back in the control of the Catholic Church.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  This is a huge deal because these are the holiest places in Christian lore, and people come from all over. They come from Italy, from England, from France. Pilgrims want to go now to visit the holy places.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  But that brings a new challenge.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Then as now, travelers are easy prey, especially in a world in which there's no such things as ATMs or travelers' checks or credit cards. You're going to need money, you're going to need goods for several months. You're easy targets for robbers. There's no Motel 6, there's no local police forces or things like that. And so you have all sorts of pilgrims who now are being murdered on the way to Jerusalem.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  I mean, literally, the roads to Jerusalem are littered with the skeletons, the pilgrims.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  In 1119, with the blessing of the Catholic Church, a French knight in Jerusalem forms a security force to protect the pilgrims. They call themselves the Poor Knights of the Temple of King Solomon, but will soon become known simply as the Knights Templar.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  This is a monastic order, and they take the vow of poverty, the vow of chastity, the vow of obedience. So you have these poor knights, but that will create one of the wealthiest orders in the world.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  This idea of fighting for God and the Holy Land really captures the imagination of the Christian world, and the Templars embody that. They attract donations from all over Christendom, and this transforms them into one of the most powerful forces of the period.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  The Knights Templar were the most charismatic, powerful order in the Middle Ages. Both priests and the bravest soldiers in the Crusades. They really capture the spirit of the age, and particularly in Rome, where the popes shower privileges on them. They're not answerable to kings, to princes, to dukes. They're only answerable directly to the Pope in Rome.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  The Templar's fortune grows through their steady stream of donations. They also acquire vast estates, castles, and cathedrals all over Europe.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  They're involved in all kinds of sectors of the European economy. They're in manufacturing, they're getting mills, they're getting all kinds of donations from wealthy donors. So they're not just a group of knights with swords. There's an entire intricate financial system that's supporting that.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  It spans all sorts of countries, and it may be, in fact, the world's first multinational corporation.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  The Templars have outposts throughout Christendom and go on to create the world's first modern banking system.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  They set up a system of effectively banking in which, if you were a pilgrim, you could make a deposit at a commandery or an outpost, and then you would have a script you could redeem when you get to Jerusalem, and you were good for it when you got there.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  These Templar commanderies, they are banks, but they're not ordinary banks. I mean, they're fortresses. Example, the Paris Temple looms over the city. I mean, it's enormous. The only thing I can think of to describe it is the castle at Disneyland. You know, it's that kind of presence in the landscape.

• 6:04Speaker 06

  And so it's banking system that will allow pilgrims to travel without resource. That way, they're less attractive to robbers, nothing to take.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Pilgrims from all over Europe feel safer because they're protected by the Templar knights.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  When the Templars establish themselves as a presence in Jerusalem, they're given the Alaskan Mosque as their headquarters, built upon the Temple of Solomon. It's on the Temple Mount. It's one of the most holy places of all three major religions in the world.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  This is the platform that was once the foundation for King Herod's massive temple. Underneath, rumored to be lots of holy treasures. So having got there, the Templars start digging below to find that treasure.

• 6:53Speaker 06

  During work in that area, the story goes the Knights Templar discovered two extremely important items for the Christian faith, the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. And so they had not only wealth, but relics.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  But in 1187 AD, things change for the Templars.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Crusades continue for centuries, and in 1187, the Muslims reconquer Jerusalem. So those pilgrimage sites are now under Muslim control, and Christians are forbidden from being there. And the function the Knights Templar had of protecting the pilgrims to the Holy Land shifts dramatically in 1187 when you can't make that pilgrimage anymore.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  The Templars are forced out of Jerusalem.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  The Knights Templar flee and presumably take all of their treasure with them that would have included perhaps the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and gold.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  They move their headquarters to the port city of Acher, about 100 miles north in what is now Israel.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Acher is a tremendously important city because it's a meeting point between East and West on one of the major trade routes from all the way to China at the time. So it was a very wealthy city, and so it was well defended.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  They have a massive fortification there. It's got 20-foot-thick walls. It's the most formidable fortress on the Mediterranean at that time.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  After a century based in Acher, in 1291, the Templar fortress is attacked by Muslim fighters. A servant to the Templars named the Templar of Tyre writes of the battle and even makes reference to the fabled treasure.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  So the Templar of Tyre is one of the important chroniclers from the late period of the Templars. He does record the last battles the Templars have.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  He describes the chaos of a medieval siege as the enemy has now broken through. He describes a main tower with four golden lions at each corner, and then another older treasure tower, which clearly has been built to protect something.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  The Templars' fortress may be strong, but they're cornered with no way out, and the treasure seems to be in imminent danger of being seized.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  If Templars brought the sacred treasures from Jerusalem to Acre, and if at that battle, the knights had to leave in such a hurry that they weren't able to take all that treasure with them, then there's the exciting possibility their treasure could still be there.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  That brings us to theory number one: the treasure was buried in Acre.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  One of the great things about the Templars is they're great builders. And this goes back to the Temple of Solomon, you know, this amazing structure that forms part of their name of the Knights Templar.

• 9:50Speaker 05

  The Templar of Tyre describes how the Templars construct these magnificent castles, and presumably that is where the Templar treasure is stored. We know this because we have surviving examples.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  Templar castles would shape the way castles were built all over Europe. Obviously, Acre was a model of that, fist of iron and stone, right there on the coast. And the Templars didn't just build these elaborate fortifications up above ground to protect cities like Acre, but they also built tunnels underground as a part of their defense strategy.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Is it possible the treasure is still there, just underground? In 2019, a team decides to search using new technology.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  What the LiDAR technology is able to do is to create a 3D image of the remains of the fortress underneath today's housing. So you get a much clearer picture of what was originally there.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  The LiDAR technology helps plot what the Templar fortress originally looked like.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  The team has been able to approximate, more or less, where the original Templar treasure tower stood. And we get a much clearer idea of where the Holy Grail may once have been kept.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  But if gold and priceless relics are buried here, they won't be recovered anytime soon.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  Governments can be finicky about digging under things, especially a place like Israel, where there's so much archaeology and so much stuff has been dug up.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  But another discovery, this one in 1994, reveals more about what's underneath Acre.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  There's a blocked sewer pipe. They get a plumber to come, and he discovers this tunnel that no one's known about for 800 years. It's a tunnel from the fortress that goes almost 500 feet out into the city, which is a really good way of smuggling things in and out.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Could it be that at one time the treasure was under Acre, but that it was en route to somewhere else?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  What we know from the historical records is that the last Templar there, the Grand Master Guillaume de Beaujoux, dies in that defense of the Siege of Acre.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  According to accounts, Thibaud Gourdain, the deputy to the Templar Grand Master Guillaume de Beaujoux, was told, "Get all that sacred treasure. Take it into the tunnels, and for God's sakes, get it out of Acre."

• 12:21Speaker 00

  After their fortress in Acre falls to Muslim marauders in 1291, the Templar treasure seems to disappear. It's fate a mystery. Is it possible that they escaped with it?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  The thought was that they could get these valuable items, meaning the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, or any of the other Templar treasure, out of the treasure tower, through one of these subterranean tunnels, and spirit them away.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  They're able to bring the treasures they have out of Acre, because you have to remember that they have fortresses throughout Europe. So they've got places. So does some of the treasure go here? Does some of the treasure go there?

• 13:01Speaker 00

  As the legend goes, the Templars look to the next safest place for the treasure.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  France is an obvious place. This is where their founders came from, and it's kind of the nerve center of the Templars.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  France has changed when the Templars return in the 13th century. King Philip IV was heavily in debt because of his war with England. It was a costly war, and Philip IV had actually looked to the Templars for help. He was deeply indebted to them.

• 13:32Speaker 04

  This is sort of an uncomfortable situation as he's looking at this increasingly powerful organization within his own kingdom.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  King Philip says, "Oh, we should get rid of them. And by the way, that means my debt is canceled to them. And by the way, I can get their goods and take their treasure."

• 13:51Speaker 04

  In the Middle Ages, if you want to discredit somebody, you say that they're a heretic. You say that they're a witch. And this is exactly what King Philip says about the Templars. He says that they are worshiping Satan, that they are engaged in illicit sexual practices with each other.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  The misinformation campaign against the Templars really does work because public support for these knights, which was once so strong, now completely craters.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  On October 13, 1307, King Philip IV gives orders to arrest and imprison all Knights Templar.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  That order goes into effect throughout Christendom. But there is one place in France where the Templars are not arrested and imprisoned.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Could this be the place where they keep their treasure? Which is theory number two: it's buried in a French village.

• 14:51Speaker 05

  The village of Rennes-le-Château has a very interesting history. The Templars have taken what they had in all of Europe, and this organization has been reduced to this isolated community that really is, in many ways, insulated from the Church. And this relationship develops with the locals, even extending into a relationship with the Count of Barcelona.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Fast forward six centuries to the late 1890s and to a small church in Rennes-le-Château sitting in the shadow of the Templar castle high on the hill above.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  There's a little church dedicated to Mary Magdalene and run by a parish priest called Berenjer Sonnier. And he wants to renovate this church. And the story goes that when he's supervising the renovation of the area around the altar, he sees something incredible.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  What he finds is sealed in wax in one of the pillars and has three wooden cylinders with parchment inside.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  The parchments are said to contain complex ciphers and coded messages. That's not the only strange discovery during the renovation.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  The story goes when construction workers are working on a hallway in an entirely different part of the church, they unearth this clay pot, and within it are gold coins and a necklace, a bracelet, and most intriguingly, a gold cup.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Could the Templars have buried their treasure in different parts of the Church of Mary Magdalene? And could the parchments provide clues as to where the rest of it might be?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  He's really excited with the parchments that he's discovered. So he takes them to Paris to be deciphered by church officials. But then he returns, and he's a different man. He's not talking about it anymore.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  He doesn't say anything about the hidden meaning of these parchments. But all of a sudden, he's got a lot of money, and he spends it on the renovations of the church.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  After his return from Paris, Sonnier will spend almost 700,000 francs in two decades' time, the equivalent of over $4 million today.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Not only did he spend thousands and thousands of francs just renovating the church at Rennes-le-Château, there's an estimate that says, well, he spends 36,000 francs building his own estate, which is an astronomical amount of money, especially in the 19th century.

• 17:23Speaker 05

  The mystery of Sonnier's wealth continues to intrigue us because we just don't know if he had the Templar treasure, had access to part of the Templar treasure, or if he only sold the parchments that he found in the parish church.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Sonier keeps his mouth shut until the end of his life, when he entrusts the secrets to his loyal housekeeper, Marie de Nardot.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Marie de Nardot is the only one that knows what's the secret to this fabulous wealth that this little parish priest has. But unfortunately, she dies in 1953 of a sudden and massive stroke. So the secret dies with her. Did Sonier come by this wealth through the Templar treasure? Or did he get his money in a very different kind of way?

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Sonier spent the last several years of his priesthood under suspicion by the Church for a practice called selling masses.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  So there is the possibility that what the priest was actually trying to mask was his own criminal activity, selling masses, a church crime that goes back centuries.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  When people are selling masses, the priest is charging effectively admission to come into the Church and to be present when the miracle of the Eucharist happens, when the Mass is celebrated. The Church has been very clear in its teaching that this should never happen. But teaching and reality are very different things sometimes.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  If Sonier didn't get the treasure, could it still be here in the Church?

• 19:00Speaker 05

  It was purported that one of the things she said before her death was that the people of Rennes-le-Château were walking on gold and didn't even know it. Is that a cryptic indication to the location of the Templar treasure?

• 19:15Speaker 00

  At the height of their power in the 13th century, the Knights Templar hold fortresses across Europe. Experts believe any one of them could hold their treasure, but for some, clues point overwhelmingly to one.

• 19:29Speaker 06

  Outside of France, the Knights Templar had influence in Portugal. And keep in mind that Portugal was an area of intense battle between Christians and Muslims. And the Knights Templar were helping Christian fighters take back the area.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  In 1160 AD, the small town of Toma becomes the Templars' Portuguese headquarters.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  There is a Templar Grand Master in Portugal, Gualdemin Peis. His statue still dominates the main square in Toma. And this battle-scarred figure oversees the construction of a Templar fortress in Toma.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  And inside this fortress is the Convent of Christ Church, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Gualdemin Peis is famous in part because of this church he builds at Toma called the Round Church. It has 16 sides built that way so the Templars could tend Mass on horseback.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And this was done so they could be ready to ride out at a moment's notice.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  But in July 1190, Toma is surrounded by Muslim forces determined to take the city back.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  They are attacked.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  And during that battle, the Templars defend Toma, and they defeat them. So the defense of Toma is a really important moment for the Templars. And it establishes Gualdemin Peis as a hero in Templar lore. Toma is a landmark site because of that victory. And many believe this would have been a place where the Templars would have kept their treasure.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  A major discovery in the 1960s might lend credence to that theory. Number three, it's buried in Portugal.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  In the 1960s, you had all sorts of treasure hunters in Europe. But you didn't have the same kinds of laws that we have today about antiquities and taking antiquities out of one place to another place. And so they're essentially grave robbers, looking for Roman artifacts. So you have these treasure hunters who are at the Convent of Christ Church in Toma. They dig into a grave and they pull out two caskets. But what they find isn't Roman, it's something quite extraordinary. There's a chalice that's obsidian. There's a reliquary to hold relics. There's a sword that has a Templar design and a cross. But they don't know what it is. And so they sell it off piece by piece.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  But clearly, what they find are Templar artifacts.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  This collection, now known as the Toma Hoard, is believed to be one of the only stashes of Templar relics ever found.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  You have treasure hunters digging up the whole place. So much of the hoard left Portugal sadly in the 1960s. But over the last decade, Templar hunters, Carl Cookson and Hamilton White, have been striving to bring all these items back into one place. And they now have achieved that.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  And so you have a scholar, Jonathan Tokli Perry, who looks at the Toma Hoard to authenticate where these things come from and says, yes, this is authentic. This actually does go back to the Templars. This is part of the treasure the Templars had.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  And we know that because due to aging, the items inside have a certain amount of calcium deposits on them. And this helps to date these items that do indeed date back to the Templar period. What we can't say with absolute certainty is that they were put in the ground by the Knights Templar themselves.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  In their search for more evidence, Cookson and White make a startling discovery.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  During their research, Cookson and White discovered that in the 1930s, there was interest in Templar treasure in Toma from a very sinister source, the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  For Hitler, it was not only the wealth for financing a war, but think of what these objects were, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail. If you have those objects, you have control over people for whom those objects are valuable. And you know, the Germans were Christian. And so having the Holy Grail, the most important symbol for Christendom in Hitler's possession, would have been a huge source of power for him. And so he sent basically Nazi treasure hunters to Portugal to try and find this treasure. And Hitler assigned some of his best people, including a troupe led by Heinrich Himmler. And we have reports of them searching in Portugal.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  But by all accounts, they came up empty-handed. So it's another quarter of a century after the Nazis have been digging around in Toma that we get these Templar hunters turning up. But neither party seems to have found the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, or any of the other Templar treasure. So as things stand today, it looks like the Templars either took whatever they had away or it's still buried.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  In the eighth century since the Knights Templar fled Jerusalem, many theories have surfaced about where their mysterious treasure could be. Some believe it remains in what's now Israel. Others suggest it could be in Portugal or France, all former Templar strongholds. But what if the treasure was taken somewhere more surprising, to a place where the Templars were certain that no one would look?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  It's where they believed they would be able to hide their treasure away. And unlike other parts of Europe, there weren't that many prying eyes looking at what the Templars were up to. Because it's very much on the fringes of the Templar world.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Leading us to theory number four, it was taken to Poland.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  There's a legend that the Templars had gone to Western Poland from Paris to seek safety, to seek refuge, both for the Templars and the treasure.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  The Templars arrive in Poland in 1232, when they're given land around the town of Schorshani on the Meßlitz River, which is just a stone's throw from the German border. And the Templars started building this chapel of Saint Stanislaus. And it most likely took many decades to complete.

• 25:57Speaker 05

  In the aftermath of these arrests on Friday the 13th, 1307, there is sort of a ripple effect across the Templar realm of influence. So that everywhere the Templars had extended influence, from Western Europe as far as the reaches of what is today Poland, ceased to exist. Fearing for their own safety, many Templars fled and would have taken whatever treasure they had with them. What became of that treasure? That's the big question.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  The story goes that the treasure found its way to Szczarzny with a small band of Templars. And medieval documents describe a well near the chapel of Saint Stanislaus. And it's rumored that the chapel has an entrance to a secret tunnel.

• 26:50Speaker 06

  Friday the 13th is significant. That's the date the arrests take place. So facing arrest, the Knights Templar, under the cover of darkness, took the Holy Grail and other valued materials

• 27:05Speaker 06

  and sunk them in a nearby lake.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  The lake dried up long ago, and no treasure has been found there. But the theory that the treasure made it somewhere in Szczarzny continues to attract attention, including interest from a local archaeologist.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Fast forward 700 years. In 2004, an archaeologist, Shebyslaw Kolozowski, brought a team of archaeologists to conduct tests and excavations at the chapel of Saint Stanislaus. What the team were hoping to discover was a Templar fortress underneath this chapel. What they found instead was a cobblestone. And that was pretty much it.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  But then, one of the archaeologists notices a small rectangular depression beneath the cobblestone. The team brings in ground-penetrating radar for a better look. What they find shocks them.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  They find seven vaulted crypts that could date back to the Templar times. These vaults are empty, which of course leads people to wonder what could have been there.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Then another discovery is made of a secret tunnel under the town of Mischli Bush, not far from the chapel of Saint Stanislaus. And between this tunnel at Mischli Bush and the chapel of Saint Stanislaus is the dry lake bed, where some believe the Templars hid their treasure. So we have this chapel. We have the entrance to a subterranean medieval vault. We have the lake, where the treasure may have been buried under cover of night. And then in a nearby town, we have this inexplicable tunnel. So local people are absolutely convinced that there is a secret that the knights left there.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  But despite these discoveries, no treasure has been found in Poland to date.

• 28:59Speaker 06

  What these discoveries point to is the tremendous building abilities of the Knights Templar. But what these tunnels and what these locations were actually used for is a matter of speculation.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Coming up, does the search for Templar treasure lead to the high seas?

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Most of the Knights Templar, brought to Paris after the arrests in 1307, refused to talk under interrogation. But one did, and he paints a vivid picture of the treasure's movement.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Confessions were extorted under terrible torture from individual Knights Templar. One of them, Jean de Chalon, claimed that the treasure was taken from the Paris temple, this extremely strongly fortified building, under cover of night, down to the port of La Rochelle. And there were waiting ships.

• 30:01Speaker 04

  He says that he saw the Templars smuggle this treasure, and that it took 50 horses to move all of it. When they arrived at the port, they had 18 ships waiting for them. And the treasure was loaded up. Then they sailed off.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Because of where they were in eastern France, historians speculate that the ships leaving there would have gone to Scotland as a place that they could defend easily. Because of course, it's an island.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  According to the story, when the Templars arrived in Scotland, a war of independence is underway. They find an ally in the Scottish king, Robert the Bruce.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  There's a legend that Robert the Bruce fought alongside the Templars at the Battle of Benochesse. And it was a major victory for Scotland in the War for Independence.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  It's said that Robert the Bruce was so grateful to the Templars for helping him to defeat the English, that he gave them privileges. He gave them titles. He gave them lands. He helped them to regroup, reassemble, and find their strength again in Scotland. And one of the places associated with the Templars in Scotland is the small town of Rosslyn. And it's there that the Sinclair family, an aristocratic family in Scotland, who developed close bonds with the Templars, also built this intriguing, fascinating chapel.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  The Sinclair family is also connected with Robert the Bruce. So you have a direct lineage of this family with the Templars and the chapel that they built. And so you get this story. Beneath this chapel, there is a secret vault that contains those treasures of the Knights Templar.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  So that's theory number five. It was protected in Scotland.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Some refer to Rosslyn as a Grail Chapel. What they mean by that is it was a place where the Templars brought the Holy Grail. And the story goes that it was buried under the nave, under flagstands, and kept in place with sand brought from Jerusalem. And that it may also include the True Cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified in Jerusalem.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  It's an amazingly detailed little chapel with the kinds of iconography that you would expect of the Templars. In the chapel, there are marvelous images of singers and musicians. And so there's a story that says, if you stand in front of this wall, which is believed to be the wall that leads to the vault, and you play a particular note on that instrument, that will cause the wall to open.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  No one has yet cracked that code or found any treasure.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  This whole idea about Rosslyn being central to the story of the Templar treasure really only gained traction in the 1980s with the publication of a bestseller called Holy Blood, Holy Grail. And then 20 years later, of course, The Da Vinci Code.

• 33:07Speaker 05

  Rosslyn Chapel is actually the final setting for the closing chapter of The Da Vinci Code. This is where the entire conspiracy comes unraveled, where it is realized that the Holy Grail is in fact not located at Rosslyn Chapel, but the Holy Grail actually represents Mary Magdalene herself.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  The Da Vinci Code is a really compelling story, but I think we need to remember it is ultimately fiction.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  But even if Rosslyn Chapel doesn't hold the treasure itself, could it hold the key to where it is now?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  One of the images that appears in stone at Rosslyn are ears of corn. It may think that's unspectacular. What you can remember is that corn didn't arrive in Europe until Christopher Columbus got to the Americas in 1492. And crops that had never been seen before suddenly arrived in Europe. So how does the Sinclair family, when they're building Rosslyn Chapel in the 1450s, decades before Columbus gets to America, how do they know about corn?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  So consider this. Going back to the Sinclair family, Sir Henry Sinclair, a friend of the Templars and also an able seaman in his own right, he helps the Templars take the treasure out of Rosslyn Chapel. And using his fleet of 12 ships, they set sail bound for the Americas.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  After traversing the Middle East and Europe in search of the fabled treasure of the Knights Templar, could searchers be looking on the wrong continent? A discovery centuries after the Templars disbanded suggests the possibility that the treasure could be thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  In 1795, on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia, a man called Daniel McInnes and his friends stumbled upon something on a particular spot that piques their curiosity. And they go to discover further.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  And so they start excavating with a great deal of enthusiasm. And the place where they dig is called Oak Island.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  This is theory number six. It's on Oak Island.

• 35:26Speaker 06

  As they dig, they uncover stones on top of planks. They continue to dig and they find more stones on top of planks. They understood this to be a human construction.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  They go as far as they can. But then, you know, their technology, they can't go any further. And so they build a company with these partners to help continue on digging.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  The digging continues. And at the 90-foot mark, they find a large stone engraved with strange symbols. Their meaning as yet unknown.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  This area becomes known as the money pit. And you can see that in two very different ways.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Is it the money pit because at the bottom of this pit is the money, the treasure? Or is it the money pit because you poured so much money into this trying to find the treasure that you're never going to get your money back?

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Since Daniel McKinney's discovery two centuries ago, a long line of researchers and explorers have invested resources on Oak Island.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  A whole range of people have turned up looking for treasure in the money pit. And they include a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, future president of the United States.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  It isn't until the 1980s when a big discovery begins to point to Templar origins.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  In the 1980s, there's a real game changer of a discovery. And that is a series of boulder-like stones. And when seen from above, they are shaped as a cross. Now this points to Templar activity.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  More wooden structures are then found underground in the second half of the 20th century. Chisel marks indicate the work was completed before the invention of modern tools.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  If we think about it, the Knights Templar were crushed in 1307. Now Christopher Columbus arrives in the Americas in 1492. So we've got a big gap.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Columbus was certainly not the first European to set foot on American shores. There was a Viking presence there probably for like 100 years in the midst of the Middle Ages.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Going back to Henry Sinclair around 1398, some are credited Sinclair was discovering Nova Scotia, which is New Scotland. So it's possible that the Sinclair family held on to the Templar treasure at Rosslyn Chapel, which they built for that purpose, before then, at the right moment, setting sail with it for the Americas. The timeline, the geography make this all feasible that the Templar treasure was taken from Scotland and then eventually deposited into the money pit.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  In 2006, search intensifies when brothers Rick and Marty Legina purchase controlling interests of Oak Island. They begin following the old clues and discovering new ones of their own.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  One of the more compelling discoveries was a lead cross with a kind of loop at the top that has been scientifically analyzed and dated. And they do date back to the Knight Templar period.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And it's a period of history on Oak Island when there's not known to have been any other human activity.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  I mean, Oak Island does seem to be kind of the place where you go to look for things that shouldn't be there, but maybe they're there. So who knows what they'll find next?

• 39:03Speaker 00

  It's that dazzling array of possibilities that's kept the treasure hunters coming back to the mystery of the Templar treasure.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  I think one of the things that people find fascinating about the Templars, even to this day, is the fact that they fell so quickly and so spectacularly. And we don't know kind of what happened after that. It seems like it should have continued or there should have been something that happened afterwards. There's some sort of resistance or something there. And so we're just wondering, where did all the wealth go?

• 39:35Speaker 04

  The Templars captured the imagination of Europe at the time. It continues to be both revered and reviled down through the centuries. Authors have made them villains and heroes like some of the Robin Hood legends and things like that.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  The Templar treasure is so powerful because you're dealing not just with physical treasure, with gold, silver jewels. You're dealing with people's faith. You're dealing with religious matters, not just simply worldly goods.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  There were this huge organization, commanderies all over the place. They had massive number of people. They had massive influence across Europe and then it was suddenly gone. We have a hard time wrapping our heads around that.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Is the treasure of the Knights Templar still out there? And what priceless relics does it hold? For now, the search continues for this mysterious and allegedly vast horde. Thanks so much for listening to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind Studios. Join us next time for a deep dive into another mystery and all the theories behind it.