1307

The year 1307 is the fulcrum on which the novel's entire secret history of the Holy Grail turns. It was the year the Knights Templar—the military arm of the Priory of Sion—were destroyed in a single, coordinated strike, an event that the book presents not as a legitimate suppression of heresy but as a calculated act of theft and suppression by the Church and the French crown. The date, Friday, October 13, 1307, is identified as the origin of the modern superstition that Friday the 13th is unlucky, a cultural echo of the day's violence.

The Massacre of the Knights Templar

According to the history Langdon recounts to Sophie, by the early 1300s the Knights Templar had amassed so much wealth and political power—thanks to a papal bull that made them "a law unto themselves"—that Pope Clement V decided they had to be stopped. Working in concert with France's King Philippe IV, the Pope devised an ingeniously planned sting operation. 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, 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.

The True Objective: The Sangreal Documents

The novel insists that the charges against the Templars were fabrications. The real goal of the 1307 purge was not religious purity but the seizure of the Templars' treasure—the Sangreal documents that proved Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene and had fathered a bloodline. 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. The documents were moved and rehidden several times, and current speculation places them somewhere in the United Kingdom.

The Legacy of 1307

The year 1307 is thus presented as the moment when the Church, having failed to destroy the evidence of Christ's humanity, instead destroyed the men who guarded it. The event is the foundational trauma of the novel's secret history, explaining why the Grail has remained hidden for centuries and why the Church would still be motivated to kill to keep it secret. The novel's own narrative, set in the present day, is framed as a direct consequence of the failure of the 1307 purge: the Priory of Sion survived, the documents survived, and the secret of the Holy Grail—the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ—has been passed down through the Merovingian line to the present day, waiting for the right moment to be revealed.