Travels with my Donkey

nostalgic and comforting, like a child's perfect My Big Fortress: plump round towers linked by long, crenellated battlements, fluttering pennants, moat, drawbridge — the works.
    I'd felt obliged to read up about the Knights Templar after my brief encounter with Tomás, and over breakfast had dutifully soiled the literature with fish-oiled fingerprints. It's a rattling tale, a saga that, like so many of my favourites, unites chivalry, international finance and necrophilia.
    Formed in 1118 by a plucky band of nine knights who had volunteered to stay in Jerusalem and protect pilgrims after most of their fellow crusaders buggered off, the Templars were the first of an unlikely breed: the Warrior Monks. Not for them the traditional monastic life, that shaving of strange parts of the head and shuffling about cellars in a felt dressing gown concocting gaily hued liqueurs — the Knights Templar vowed loudly to slaughter any Saracen who threatened the safe passage of Christian pilgrims (and, less loudly, never to lose a horse, throw a coat to the ground in anger or sodomise one other).
    Supported at first by handouts from grateful pilgrims, and then by huge donations from the monarchs of Europe, the Templars were soon active across the Continent: by 1240, the order was 20,000 strong, protecting Christian travellers on a front that stretched from Santiago to the Holy Land. No less valuable to the holy traveller was the Knights' contribution to fiscal convenience and security: such was their reputation for steadfast trustworthiness that a pilgrim could exchange his vulnerable purseful of calling-all-brigands gold coinage for a letter of credit, redeemable at any branch of Templars across the continent. 'In God we trust,' goes that notice by the till. 'Everyone else pays cash.' But in medieval Europe, the Templars achieved the Almighty's credit rating, and in doing so effectively invented banking as we (sort of) know it.
    When the Saracens drove the Christians from the Holy Land in 1291, the Templars found their offensive role abruptly reduced, a situation compounded by their own efficiency in helping to drive the Moors from northern Spain. Having largely done their job, the Templars were now a threat — responsible only to the Pope and in charge of a titanic financial empire that was by now lending money to the very kings who'd once sponsored them so generously.
    The end was swift and — yes! — brutal. The castle in Ponferrada, a gift from Fernando II of León, was finished in 1282, but the Knights had only been strutting up and down its great halls for twenty-five years when Philip 'the Fair' of France leant on the Pope to authorise the arrest of the Templars, all of them, on grounds of heresy. And, sure enough, with the application of a little medieval persuasion, apprehended warrior monks found themselves reminiscing on long evenings of lavish bum-sex, often whilst flicking the Vs at the Virgin — what with all that and the image of a giant cat to worship, it was no wonder a few horses got lost. One Templar, his memory jogged with particular firmness, recalled having made sweet love to his exhumed girlfriend's corpse; and in fact, now that he thought of it, returning to the grave nine months later to find a chirpy little skeleton son awaiting him like some sort of calcium Pinocchio. The last Grand Master of the order, Jacques de Molay, was burnt at the stake in 1314; before the year was up, both King Phil and the Pope had fulfilled de Molay's fireside curse by dropping dead.
    I still don't know where any of this leaves Tomás. Though by the looks of his wardrobe he'd thrown a lot more than his coat to the ground in anger.
    The extraordinary rise and fall of the Knights Templar has encouraged all manner of historical speculation, very little of it properly academic, linking the order with the Turin Shroud, Freemasonry and inevitably the Holy Grail. Not surprising, therefore, that Ponferrada, the Templars' camino HQ, exerts a mystical lure that a certain sort of pilgrim is powerless to resist. Paulo Coelho chose the castle as the setting for his pilgrimage's initiatory denouement: 'I took all of my clothes off,' I read, without appropriate fascination, 'and Petrus handed me a perfumed black tunic.' And Shirley lost it big time in Ponferrada, falling over what she calls the edge of reason — a metaphorical precipice, be assured, that is in her case rather more distantly located than might be considered usual. During a