The Knights Templar have always been a fascinating subject for me. Among the reasons for that fascination has been the speculation that the Shroud of Turin – believed by many to be the burial shroud of Christ – was once in their possession, and may even have been the idol that the Knights were accused of venerating when the order was suppressed. I don’t know whether or not that story is true, but we now know that the Shroud was once in the possession of the Templars.

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years. The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers. The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative. Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians. However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

We now can date the Shroud back to the 1200s, significantly before the date that radiocarbon testing had placed it. And we now know that some of what the Templars were accused of was clearly unjust. So what we have here is a mystery and a history that trumps any novel – take that, Dan Brown!