Tomar is a small city with a population of twenty-one thousand, and the train station put me at the edge of town. I walked ten blocks into the heart of the city, arriving at the Praça da República, a large and airy public square encircled with a good selection of restaurants. After choosing one of the eateries for lunch, I walked one hundred meters down the main pedestrian way of Serpa Pinto Street. There I found a tiny, basic hotel called Residential Luz, where I got a great deal on a small single room with a bathroom for just twenty euros. It was the off-season and most of their fourteen rooms were unoccupied, so the place was quiet as well as clean. I spent my entire afternoon that day visiting the castle and the Convent of Christ monastery and church, which the Knights Templar built in the middle of the twelfth century and used as their base of operations in Portugal.
The castle of Tomar was constructed in a strategic location, perched atop a large hill that looms over the city, and my walk up to the castle/convent/church complex was arduous. The path was steep and full of winding switchbacks. The first things I noticed when looking up at the outside walls of the fortifications were the arrow loop embrasures in the form of a crucifix on top of the battlements. I could visualize Templar bowmen shooting their arrows down at mounted Moorish attackers from behind the safety of those narrow openings in the walls.
Only after the first king of Portugal drove the Moors out of Tomar and then later out of Santarém and Lisbon was a Portuguese nation-state possible, and King Afonso Henriques granted the Templars a large percentage of the reconquered territory. The Templars would create a kingdom inside of a kingdom in Tomar. The Order of the Knights Templar traces its origins to shortly after the end of the First Crusade, when, at the beginning of the twelfth century, a French nobleman Hugues de Payens organized eight of his knighted relatives in a mission to protect pilgrims on their journeys to holy places. The king of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, granted the small group permission to set up its base of operations in the Holy Land on the Temple Mount.
The knights became known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, which would be shortened eventually to Knights Templar. The Templars in Portugal began to receive large donations, and they purchased large tracts of lands starting in the third decade of the twelfth century. They began building the Tomar monastery around this time, though the castle’s construction would not get underway until 1160. The king of Aragon (on the Iberian Peninsula) ceded valuable land to the Templars at his death in the 1130s. The enormous wealth of the Templars also came from new initiates, who had to take vows of poverty and chastity and would relinquish all their material possessions, including their horses, land, and business interests, to the monastic brotherhood. In 1139 Pope Innocent II decreed that the order was subject to no authority but the Pope’s, and they were made exempt from taxation. By then the order had spread throughout England, France, Spain, and Portugal.
In order to fulfill their mission of “protecting pilgrims visiting holy places,” the Templars became the elite fighting force of their day and were known to engage much larger armies, rarely ever retreating and often sustaining heavy casualties in battles during the Crusades. Around 1150, this mission of guarding pilgrims expanded to a mission of guarding the material wealth of pilgrims. The Templars began a kind of banking innovation by issuing “letters of credit” to wealthy pilgrims. A pilgrim would visit a Templar center in their home country in Europe, and they would receive a “letter of credit” for the land deeds and material valuables they left with the Templars for safekeeping. During their travels, these wealthy pilgrims could stop at other Templar centers to withdraw funds from their accounts. And so the order’s financial power became substantial, and their organization became less geared toward combat and more focused on economic endeavors.
I reached the outer defensive wall that surrounded the castle and went inside the archway that passed through it, where I studied a couple of informational plaques. One simply said, “Convento de Christo—Monumento National,” which means “Monastery of Christ—National Monument of Portugal.” Before the Spanish Civil War, the Convento de Christo was the private residence of the marquis and count of Tomar; however, the complex was put into the control of the state in 1933. In 1983 it would become a World Heritage Site.
For me it was like walking into Fenway Park for a Boston Red Sox game and seeing the expanse of green grass on the playing field magically open up before your eyes as you come up one of the enclosed tunnels into the open expanse of the stadium. Once inside the walls of the castle, I found myself walking along a wide dirt path with trimmed hedges on either side that enclosed lushly landscaped gardens full of orange trees, ornamental shrubs, and carefully pruned evergreens. The space encircled by the outer castle walls was as big as a soccer field, and looming directly ahead was the round church rotunda. The Templars introduced Eastern ideas to twelfth century Portugal, including the idea of a round church. Churches throughout Europe had always been built in the shape of a Greek cross, so this sixteen-sided, buttressed church with round windows was a radical departure. It is believed that the church was modeled after both the Mosque of Omar and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem from plans brought back from the Crusades by the Templars. The introduction of round towers in the outer protective walls and the construction of a citadel with a central tower that offered residential and defensive functions were also new to twelfth century Portugal.
The most transformative idea that the Templars brought back from their travels to the East was their adoption of Gnostic philosophy. The belief that enlightenment can come from within each individual and that the divine can be experienced by taking responsibility for one’s own spiritual development is the central tenet of Gnosticism. Other Gnostic sects such as the Cathars and the Bogomils also believed in a doctrine of “living resurrection,” which has ancient roots in the teachings of the Essenes and the Nazirites and their priestly messiah John the Baptist. These ideas were threatening to the Catholic Church, which purposely maintained a monopoly on salvation through the sacraments it offered to the faithful and the idea that the individual could approach God only through the intermediary of a priest or bishop. Self-empowerment was not tolerated by the Catholic Church at the time. For the Gnostics, resurrection was not a physical phenomenon that happened in the future when one died, but rather a here-and-now spiritual enlightenment that occurred through an out-of-body experience referred to as “raising the dead.” Initiates of Gnosticism were exposed to a knowledge that expanded their consciousness and provided a vision of being one with the universe. This belief is similar to Eckhart Tolle’s idea that has been resonating with me throughout my journey so far—that we are not the objects of our awareness but are pure awareness itself. The Templars believed that when their consciousness was expanded then they were enlightened, or “risen.” Conversely, those deprived of the secret knowledge and teachings were viewed as “unaware,” or dead, and they were doomed to perpetually walk through life as if asleep. For the Gnostics, the material world was evil, and God was wholly transcendent from his creation. God was too perfect and too infinite to interact with the evil of the material universe. They also believed that human beings were “sparks” of the same spiritual essence that is God. However, we are trapped in material bodies and subject to sin, which is caused by the lack of “secret knowledge” of our true nature.
God initiates our salvation because he wants to draw back pieces of himself. Had I lived during the twelfth century, I would have been powerfully drawn to Gnostic philosophy.
From "Portuguese Camino - In Search of the Infinite Moment"