Original subtitles

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] A team of truthseekers is on a mission.

Scientists. Historians. Archaeologists.

All on the trail of history's enigmas.

Searching for the truth

behind the greatest mysteries

known to humanity.

For centuries, kings, sultans, scholars, and treasure hunters

have been searching for the Holy Grail,

the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper.

But does it still exist?

Could it have survived intact

for over 2,000 years?

And if it has, where is it now?

In London, our team assemble.

Our four truthseekers combine

decades of experience in different fields.

But they all have one goal.

To apply their knowledge, uncover the sources,

and reveal the truth.

There are mysteries and then there are mysteries.

I have always loved uncovering the secrets of the past.

We need to go back and unpick the untruths from the truths.

Age-old problems that we've been asking ourselves

for over 100 years, really, can now be solved.

[narrator] They'll follow the clues left behind.

Unravel the secrets of the past.

Separate fact from fiction.

And together, they'll uncover the truth

behind the greatest mysteries ever.

[epic music playing]

[narrator] According to the Bible,

before his crucifixion,

Jesus Christ shared a meal

with his 12 disciples in Jerusalem.

He gave the 12 apostles bread and wine,

telling them it was his body and his blood.

He served them with a cup.

A grail.

For centuries, scholars and treasure hunters

have been intrigued by a tantalizing question.

What became of the actual cup

used by Christ at the Last Supper?

And might it still exist?

[Mark] Whether you're religious, you're not religious,

it's still a really fascinating story.

[Karen] The Holy Grail is of interest to me, above all,

for all of the different ways people have interpreted it.

But they've had very different ideas

about what it is and what it means.

[narrator] The hunt for the Grail has lasted centuries.

It has led to countless theories and disputed claims,

of ancient codes and secret societies,

of divine visions and occult superstitions.

The team's challenge is to find the truth among the myth.

I think a lot of people are fascinated by the Holy Grail,

or at least aware of its existence.

But the truth, the reality behind these stories,

is something we really need to uncover.

The origin of this hunt isn't in the pages of history

or even the Bible.

This is a mystery created by literature, by stories.

[narrator] Dr. Fern Riddell is a cultural historian.

She studies the beliefs and ideas of the past.

She's been looking into the earliest roots

of the Grail legend.

To understand it, we need to go back to the beginning,

to the earliest references we have to the Holy Grail.

And that's in the medieval stories

about knights and chivalry,

Camelot and King Arthur.

So, we find the earliest references to the Holy Grail

in the unfinished poem

"Perceval," by Chrétien de Troyes,

which was written in the 12th century.

This is really when we start to see Europe

become fascinated with what is a founding myth of Britain.

[narrator] Chrétien de Troyes wrote several stories

about the court of King Arthur.

Arthur was a king of legend.

A great warrior who defended Britain

with his sword, Excalibur,

and ruled alongside a round table

of noble knights.

Chrétien's last, unfinished poem

told the story of a young man named Perceval.

He set off on a quest, and along the way,

he encounters the Holy Grail.

The story of Perceval is a story of a young man

who desperately wants to prove himself as a knight.

So, he's sent off on this amazing quest.

And whilst he's having this incredible adventure,

he comes across a castle, and in front of it is a lake,

or a moat, with a man in a fishing boat.

This is the person we call

the Fisher King, or the Grail King.

And he's the guardian of these incredible artifacts.

[narrator] The Fisher King invites Perceval

to stay at his castle.

While Perceval is a guest there,

he is witness to a very strange procession.

Young men and women parade through

the chambers of the castle.

Each bears magnificent and magical objects.

First, a white lance dripping blood.

Then a golden candelabra.

And then a beautiful girl enters,

carrying a gleaming dish studded with gemstones.

Our first glimpse at the Grail.

This is the earliest known reference to the Grail.

The thing is, it has nothing explicitly

to do with Jesus Christ.

And it's not a cup at all.

It's really more of a platter, a food dish.

Chrétien de Troyes doesn't give us a lot of explanation

of what these things are, what these artifacts mean,

but it's clearly incredibly important

and something that holds a lot of meaning to the stories.

[narrator] Not long after Chrétien de Troyes,

another French poet wrote his own tale

of the knights of King Arthur.

So Robert de Boron, he really changes the story

to make it explicitly Christian,

so it becomes an object that held the blood of Christ

that was then passed through people

before arriving in England.

[narrator] In his telling, the man responsible

for burying Christ, Joseph of Arimathea,

is given the cup from the Last Supper

and uses it to cleanse Christ's body

after the crucifixion.

He then puts the Grail in Christ's tomb.

After the Resurrection,

Christ appears to Joseph

and gives him the Grail for safekeeping.

Joseph forms a brotherhood to guard the holy vessel.

Eventually, they take it to Britain,

to the castle of the Fisher King.

That is where the knights of King Arthur

come on their quest.

[Fern] So what Robert de Boron does

is he connects the Grail to the blood of Christ,

and it makes it this incredibly important object.

Now, these were just two of a whole host

of Arthurian romances

being written in Europe at this time.

They're all embroidering it, adding a detail to the legend.

There's no definitive version.

It's a cultural moment.

He's also writing for a European audience,

so these stories bond

these different countries and different cultures together.

[narrator] This was an era of European crusades,

when armies of soldiers and knights

traveled across the known world

to fight for Christianity.

The first crusade set the tone of the wars to come.

After the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099,

almost the entire Muslim

and Jewish communities were slaughtered.

Thousands upon thousands.

There were seven more crusades to come

and more than five million people

would lose their lives.

Disease was rife. Battles were brutal.

Atrocities were common.

So this time, the 11th to the 13th century,

is really the time of the Crusades.

And it's when Christianity is trying to wrestle control

of the Holy Land from Jewish and Islamic culture.

So the purpose of the Grail stories

is to really kind of combat

the violence and horrific atrocities

that the crusades are enacting in the Holy Land.

It's a way of portraying knights not as marauders

who are raping and murdering people,

but as these noble, pure-hearted people

in pursuit of glorious Christian artifacts.

[narrator] The Grail stories

were written for the crusading class.

The ruling elite were being called by God

to bring Christianity to the Holy Land,

and they were giving their sons and fortunes

to this religious war.

It's estimated that only

one in three crusaders

ever came back,

sometimes fewer.

[Fern] So that's powerful, rich, wealthy warrior men.

And it's a way of giving them a place in the world

and a holy meaning behind horrific violence.

These are the people who are going off

to fight in the Crusades,

and they want to believe

more than anything,

that what they are saying and what they are doing

has a reason, has a purpose.

[narrator] But by the end of the 13th century,

as crusades and the Middle Ages came to a close,

the popularity of the Grail legends faded.

Fashions changed.

Renaissance Europe rediscovered

the Greek and Roman heroes,

and questing knights seemed simple in comparison.

By the 17th century,

we're getting the story of Don Quixote,

a satire about an aging country gentleman

trying to revive the days of chivalry,

and lots of these old romances are now becoming a parody.

[narrator] The Grail legends were written in a time

when Christian Europe was united under the authority of the Pope.

The Reformation shattered all that.

Wars of religion tore the continent apart.

Knights were more murderous than chivalric,

and the quest for the Holy Grail

was out of touch and forgotten.

Protestants weren't keen on relics.

Worshipping false idols was seen as a Catholic trait

in a religiously divided continent.

And so stories like the Grail were perhaps

always going to be viewed with hostility

in the parts of Europe where Protestantism took hold.

But the stories fared little better elsewhere.

The Catholic church was reasserting traditional faith.

The Grail, while a deeply religious symbol,

didn't have its roots in the Gospels

or the early teachings of the church.

So nowhere in Europe, is there really the oxygen

for these Grail stories to survive.

[narrator] For centuries, the Grail seemed to disappear

from the imagination of writers and poets.

But time passed and fashions changed,

and the Grail myth re-surfaced once again.

[Fern] When we hit the 19th century,

we get this incredible kind of revival of interest

in the Arthurian myths and legends.

And that's because it's coming out

of the Industrial Revolution.

So people have had this huge social change,

intense technological advancement,

and they want to connect to a purer time.

And that time is the court of King Arthur.

Knights and courtly love.

[narrator] For the first time in hundreds of years,

new printings were made of the medieval poems.

In Germany, Richard Wagner spent 25 years

composing "Parsifal," an opera based on the Grail story.

In Britain, popular new interpretations

of the old legends by the likes of

the English Poet Alfred Tennyson

sold thousands of copies.

This was the time of the empire.

Britain expanding its influence around the world.

And this heroic, holy version of Britain's past,

fitted this self-confident age.

They also have a young queen on the throne, Queen Victoria.

So to make a world in which

people are in pursuit of a higher ideal

is something Victorians find very attractive.

So there is this incredible moment in the 19th century

where writers, thinkers,

intellectuals, and ordinary people

are re-obsessed with not just King Arthur,

but the hunt for the Holy Grail.

[narrator] The revival of the Grail legends

was a reaction by some against

the technological advances of the Victorian era.

But those same scientific instincts

were then applied to the legends themselves.

People started looking for what lay behind these stories.

They started looking for the Holy Grail

outside the pages of a book.

The cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper.

In tales told in the Middle Ages,

it was hunted by King Arthur

and his knights of the Round Table.

But what is the truth behind the Grail?

Could it really exist? And, if it does,

where might modern-day Grail hunters find it?

Our team of historians and scientists

is examining the evidence.

After that long period where they were almost forgotten,

the Grail stories were rediscovered

in the 19th century,

and that coincided with the development

of new sciences.

The 19th century saw an explosion

in scientific understanding across fields,

and this included the study of the ancient past.

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] Dr. Karen Bellinger is an anthropologist.

She's been on the trail of the 19th-century Grail hunters.

[Karen] Archaeology emerged as a scientific field

which sought to understand

the people who had produced these objects in the past.

To put a bunch of objects into context

that could tell us a whole story about our human past.

[narrator] Earlier scholars had been known as antiquarians.

They were essentially collectors of individual objects.

But these new scientists, archaeologists,

were not just interested in the beautiful or the valuable.

They knew that even a shard of broken pottery

could hold a vital clue.

[Karen] In a nutshell, the difference between

antiquarianism and archaeology

is that antiquarians are concerned

with individual objects,

whereas archaeologists want to know

how all the objects in a site connect.

[narrator] The new science of archaeology was developing fast,

and making some extraordinary discoveries.

What it revealed were not only

the physical remains of the ancient past,

but the hidden truth behind some of the greatest stories

in history.

In the middle of the 19th century,

a British archaeologist named Frank Calvert

believed he had identified the site

of the ancient city of Troy in Western Turkey.

Famous from the legendary poems of Homer,

Troy had long been thought a place

that existed only in myth.

But Calvert was certain that it was real

and that he knew where it was.

He shared his discovery with a wealthy German

named Heinrich Schliemann.

Schliemann, an entrepreneur

and committed amateur archaeologist,

financed vast excavations at the site.

What he found stunned the world.

[Karen] Heinrich Schliemann made a spectacular discovery

at the site of Troy.

And that was a huge cache

of silver and gold vessels

and jewels

that he termed Priam's treasure.

This was, people thought,

tangible proof of myth as reality,

here in the ground,

evidence for what had only been known

from Homer's epic poem, "The Iliad."

[narrator] As the world marveled at

Schliemann's discoveries at Troy,

there were those who thought that if a story

from the 8th century BC could be true,

then why not others?

What about the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper?

Why not look for the Holy Grail?

In 1906, a young Englishman

named Wellesley Tudor Pole had a vision.

He dreamt he was a monk at the ancient abbey in Glastonbury.

It was the beginning of a lifelong obsession

with the Holy Grail.

[Karen] Glastonbury is located in the southwest of England,

and it's got a deep association with Arthurian legend.

A group of monks claimed in the 12th century

that they had suddenly found the graves

of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere

in their cemetery of an abbey

which had just recently burned down.

[narrator] The Mediaeval legends told that Joseph of Arimathea

brought the Grail to England from the Holy Land.

Coming to Glastonbury, Joseph buried the sacred cup

beneath a large hill there,

and went on to found the monastery.

In the early 1900s,

Wellesley Tudor Pole went looking for that cup.

Wellesley Tudor Pole is an interesting character, for sure.

He was a grain trader,

but he was always very interested in spiritualism

and the supernatural.

When Pole was about 18 years old,

he fell ill and he experienced visions of Glastonbury,

and of the Holy Grail.

Pole's sister and some friends

went to Glastonbury to investigate,

and what they found there was astonishing.

In a spring that ran red at the surface,

they found a glass bowl.

[narrator] It was made of blue glass,

trimmed in green, and covered in tiny crosses.

To Pole, it looked ancient.

It looked like the Holy Grail.

On July 20th, 1907, Pole presented it to the press.

This discovery was sensational news.

And even the likes of Mark Twain went to look at this bowl

and declared it one of the most singular experiences

of his life.

[narrator] But the Glastonbury Grail was soon discovered

to be a flight of fancy,

a story that Mark Twain would have been proud

to have authored himself.

It turns out, Pole wasn't the only one

having visions of the Grail at Glastonbury.

As it happens, just a few years previously,

a Welsh doctor had visited Italy

and purchased a beautiful glass bowl there,

which he decided had to have been something

with ancient and mysterious powers.

[narrator] In around 1898,

this doctor had a vision

telling him to take his "grail" to Glastonbury.

He hid it in the spring until it was found

by Wellesley Tudor Pole just a few years later.

The glass bowl was old, but nowhere near old enough.

And there was no proof outside of a vision

to link it to Jesus Christ.

[narrator] The excitement of the press soon ebbed away,

but interest in the Grail did not,

for the great myths, false alarms,

were all fuel to the fire.

There were others now searching for the truth,

and they were looking not in visions,

but in even earlier myth and folklore.

Around the time of Pole's adventures in Glastonbury,

a new discipline was emerging.

It was called anthropology, and it concerned itself

with looking at the ways people did things

in different ways in different cultures at different times.

Those practicing this new field of anthropology

were immediately interested in the Grail.

[narrator] In 1890,

the Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer

published "The Golden Bough."

The book was ground-breaking.

It examined myths and religious beliefs

from around the world

and identified

the links between them.

In "The Golden Bough," Frazer put forth a view

in which human beliefs

across different cultures throughout time

progressed in a single linear fashion.

Beginning with magic, moving on to religious belief,

and finally, to the enlightenment of science.

Frazer's ideas were extremely controversial.

This is the 19th century,

and the great and good of Christian Europe

were quite incensed at the idea

that Christianity would essentially

be put on a par with pagan beliefs.

Modern anthropologists reject Frazer's theories,

but at the time, they were hugely influential.

[narrator] Other scholars soon applied Frazer's thinking

to the Holy Grail.

They wondered if the Grail legends

of the Medieval era

were not the beginning of the story.

Fraser's ideas prompted the belief that

perhaps ideas about the Grail

predated Christian belief systems.

So people began looking even earlier

to pre-Christian cultures.

[narrator] The Celts were an ancient people

who are thought to once have lived across much of Europe.

But the spread of the Roman Empire

and then Christianity

pushed them to the fringes

of their former territories.

By the 6th century, the Celts could be found

only in parts of Britain, Ireland, and northern France.

But despite this long history,

there is much that is still mysterious about the Celts.

The Celts are believed at one time

to have occupied most of Europe.

But we don't have much information about them,

and that's because their enemies tended to hunt them down,

and secondly, because they kept oral traditions

as opposed to written histories.

[narrator] Some old Celtic tales did survive long enough

to be written down in the Middle Ages.

Later, anthropologists searched for connections

between those stories and the Holy Grail.

And they found something.

The motif of a cauldron

with magical, life-giving properties.

The cauldron is absolutely central to Celtic life,

both in an everyday domestic sense,

but also in a ritual belief sense.

So, the cauldron is where cooking was done

and washing and bathing.

But, it had sort of a magical effect.

The legend goes that the sorceress Ceridwen

gifted Brân the Blessed, a warrior god,

a cauldron which would resurrect the bodies of dead warriors.

It wasn't much of a leap at the time

for people to see a link between this cauldron

with regenerative powers,

and the Holy Grail, which was meant to be full

of the blood of the redemption of Jesus Christ.

[narrator] But this new science of anthropology

was again attempting to place Jesus and the Grail

in a European setting.

The Celts were a pan-European tribe

who had proven contact both in trade and military

with the pre-Christian eastern Mediterranean,

but there was no full picture of their belief system

or any evidence of whether their "life-giving cauldrons"

developed in a European or wider context.

But this just doesn't add up for the truthseekers.

[Karen] It's groping in the dark, really.

It's the hope that new science can solve old mysteries.

But something like the Holy Grail

defies easy answers.

[narrator] Our team of truthseekers

have looked at what the Grail could be,

but the search for the one true Grail

continues into the modern era.

During the 20th century,

new and even more radical ideas emerged.

One theory would lead to immense riches.

Another would drive a man to his death.

And one would win the admiration

of a dictator.

[narrator] The truthseekers have examined

the origins of the Holy Grail.

And the 19th-century attempts

to apply modern science to the stories.

But the Grail has attracted more radical thinkers as well.

Archaeologist Dr. Mark Altaweel has been investigating.

[dramatic music playing]

[Mark] These are often called "pseudo-histories."

And while we can certainly pick holes

in the theories themselves, I still think we can learn a lot

by asking why they came up with the answers they did.

Because in the 20th century, the hunt for the Holy Grail

became part of a far bigger story,

one of the darkest chapters

in the history of humanity.

[narrator] From a young age, the German scholar Otto Rahn

was fascinated by stories of chivalry and adventure.

His favorite was Wolfram von Eschenbach's

13th-century poem "Parzival."

It told the story of Percival,

who became a knight and set off on a quest

for the Holy Grail.

When Otto Rahn grew up, he became convinced

the poem had a hidden meaning.

He set out to uncover the truth.

[Mark] He became fascinated with that story,

that perhaps this grail existed.

One of the things he was quite interested in

is, of course, the stories, what were considered once

heretical movements or even pagan ideas.

Both pagans and heretics, of course,

would have been denounced by the church.

Rahn knew that at the time Wolfram von Eschenbach

was writing his epic poem in the early 1200s,

the Catholic Church was fighting to suppress

one particular heretical sect in the south of France.

They were known as the Cathars.

[narrator] The Cathars believed that

there were actually two gods,

one good and one evil.

To the Catholic Church, this was heresy.

The Pope launched a crusade to wipe the Cathars out.

After more than three decades of fighting,

in 1244, the last of the Cathars

retreated to a mountain fortress.

[Mark] They were pinned down into their last stronghold,

and 200 Cathars were literally burned

for their belief, their heretical beliefs.

But there was rumor that some actually escaped,

and with them came these great treasures that they saved.

[yells]

[narrator] In 1933,

Otto Rahn published his first book,

"Crusade Against the Grail."

It told the story of the fall of the Cathars,

and the escape of the Holy Grail.

He believed that hidden among the treasure

was the Holy Grail.

He matched places described in the epic medieval poems

with actual locations in the Cathar heartlands

of southern France.

He wrote a book called, "Crusade Against the Grail,"

which, in all honesty, was a flop,

in terms of sales, at least.

But, the power of books sometimes is not so much

in the numbers of readers, but who reads it.

[narrator] In the same year Rahn published his book,

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seized power in Germany.

One man in the new regime

shared Rahn's fascination

with the Holy Grail.

The head of the SS

and one of the most powerful men

in Nazi Germany,

Heinrich Himmler.

[Mark] So Himmler found a lot of interest in this book,

mostly because it fit quite closely

with his ideology and his beliefs,

which is, this kind of pre-Christian world of heroes.

[narrator] Himmler was obsessed with myth and the occult.

Otto Rahn's book was perfect for him.

It detached the story of the Holy Grail

from the Christian world

and tied it into an older, German tradition.

[Mark] And Himmler, of course, had the power to make Rahn

not only a well-known figure,

but also, effectively, shape his research.

[narrator] Himmler summoned Rahn to a meeting.

He offered to bankroll the young man's research.

Rahn's end of this bargain with the devil

was to find the Holy Grail,

a seemingly impossible task.

So, really, it's a match made in Nazi heaven,

which is basically Rahn being brought into

the world of the SS.

So Rahn, being someone who was effectively

an obscure scholar prior to Himmler meeting him,

happily says yes and embraces the Nazi world,

and goes on his quest to find the Grail.

[narrator] Rahn joined the SS and got to work.

With Himmler's backing, he scoured Europe

for proof of his theory.

In 1937, he published the results.

His second book, "Lucifer's Court."

He basically flips the narrative.

He takes, what was once a religious story

that supported Christianity, this quest for the Grail,

and now makes it actually an anti-Christian kind of quest.

[narrator] The book claims that the Cathars were in fact Aryans,

the superior race of the Nazis' twisted ideology.

These Cathars worshipped the morning star,

the light-bringer Lucifer,

and their treasure was the Grail.

It goes on to claim that Christianity

was then invented by Jews to force people

to worship a Jewish Jesus Christ.

The Church then stole

the symbol of the Grail for themselves,

hunted down the pre-Christian Aryans,

and vilified Lucifer as the devil.

Lucifer now becomes the hero, so the devil becomes the hero.

These sort of pre-Christian gods and heroes

are the real heroes. They're the ones who established

the great European civilization.

So they really twisted the sort of ideas of the Grail

and tried to make it one of their own

Nazi myth, if you will, in the making.

[narrator] What Rahn didn't find, of course,

was the Grail.

Despite that failure,

Himmler was pleased with Rahn's second book.

He even gave a copy to Adolf Hitler as a gift.

But as Otto Rahn climbed higher in the Nazi ranks,

he was increasingly troubled.

He's not really your typical Nazi.

He's gay, for one,

and he has his own internal struggles, perhaps,

with the ideology of the Nazis,

and also what he's seeing around him.

So he's having second thoughts. He knew he made that deal

with the devil, effectively.

[narrator] The contradictions in Rahn's life

were tearing him apart.

Disillusioned and depressed,

in March 1939, Rahn resigned from the SS.

[Mark] And Himmler basically says, sure, go ahead and resign.

But resigning from the SS is like resigning from the mob.

You don't really resign.

So, not surprisingly,

a few months, literally, after he resigned in 1939,

he was found dead on a mountaintop.

But one thing we do know is that neither Rahn,

or the Nazis, for that matter,

were successful in finding the Holy Grail.

[narrator] But the Nazis were not the only ones

to have hunted the Grail.

And the Cathars were not the only people

suspected of hiding it.

The Grail's foundations as a story

are so ambiguous, different groups

can pick the part they want to believe,

the part they want to pursue.

So, for the Nazis, it could be a symbol

of a pre-Christian world, and be searched for

in the shadows of a pagan past.

But for others, it only made sense to search for it

in the very heart of ancient Christianity.

In Jerusalem itself.

[narrator] The Knights Templar was a religious order

of warrior monks.

Founded in 1120,

their headquarters in Jerusalem was only a short distance

from where Christ was entombed.

The story goes that the knights

went digging beneath their temple,

searching for ancient artifacts.

There, hidden deep within the earth,

they thought they had found the Holy Grail.

Later, when the Knights Templar's order

was suppressed by the Catholic Church,

their treasures, including the Grail,

were apparently hidden.

A lake in Poland has been suggested,

or a chapel in Scotland,

or even in North America.

There's no real proof, of course,

to link the Templars to the Grail.

They were a military organization,

not really interested in such things.

[narrator] But there is one theory which manages

to incorporate all of this.

The Cathars from Otto Rahn.

The Knights Templar and the idea

of a secret history behind the Grail.

[Mark] In 1982, the book, "The Holy Blood

and the Holy Grail" was published.

It outlined a new theory about the Grail,

one that remains famous and controversial.

[narrator] The authors of the book claimed to have revealed

an ancient conspiracy.

A secret so dangerous

that countless had died to protect it.

The book's theory was that

the Grail was not, in fact, the cup

used by Christ at the Last Supper.

Instead, it was Mary Magdalene's womb.

The Grail was a metaphor for Mary,

the vessel in which Christ's child was carried.

So the book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail"

was basically a story about Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene

and then going off to France, to Europe,

escaping the Holy Land and having children,

and eventually establishing a dynasty

that becomes the French rulers.

[narrator] This secret was kept safe through history

by a mysterious ancient society called the Priory of Sion.

"The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" claimed

that the Catholic Church spent centuries fighting this order,

suppressing the truth to prevent the descendants of Christ

from threatening the Pope's power on earth.

But it was all an elaborate hoax.

[Marl] According to the book, that's why the Cathars in France

were wiped out and the Templars suppressed.

They were both guardians of the Grail.

But it's a conspiracy theory version of history,

based on innuendo and imagination

and outright forgery.

[narrator] The Priory of Sion

was not an ancient order at all.

In fact, it was founded in 1956

by Pierre Plantard, a draughtsman and forger.

The problem with the story is, of course,

the story was fabricated.

Pierre Plantard literally made the story up

and put documents in the library for them to be found,

which, eventually, those documents

form the basis of the book.

[narrator] Plantard hopes to create a new history,

an ancient and secret order of chivalry

with him as its modern heir.

He had no idea how his hoax would develop.

When the authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail"

picked up Plantard's ruse,

it became part of their modern legend,

the secret history of the world's greatest lost relic.

And the myth only grew.

[Mark] This later, of course, became the inspiration

for the blockbuster novel and film, "The Da Vinci Code."

And while it may seem a more suitable subject for a novel,

its popularity and that of other

conspiracy theories about the Grail tells us something.

It tells us about our hunger for hidden truth.

It tells us that the quest for the Holy Grail

is still one that we find alluring to this day.

[narrator] These conspiracy theories of heretics,

warrior knights, and underground societies

make for alluring stories.

But have they missed the truth?

The only real evidence supports the existence

of the Grail in Jerusalem,

centuries after the crucifixion of Christ.

Two thousand years have passed

since the time of Jesus Christ,

but the hunt for the cup he used

at the Last Supper before his Crucifixion continues.

[dramatic music playing]

[no audible dialog]

Tony McMahon is a historian.

He's been taking a closer look

at the cups identified as the Grail today.

The Holy Grail has been construed

as many things over the centuries.

So, the most famous is a cup

in which the blood of Christ was held.

Or was it a plate,

as it seems to be described

in one of the Arthurian romances?

Or, a stone from the devil's crown

that popped out when he was thrown out of heaven.

[narrator] There have been hundreds of cups

identified as the Holy Grail.

In the early 20th century especially,

a whole host of claims emerged.

[Tony] There was the Nanteos Cup of Wales

that found fame in 1905.

During the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII,

a group of monks are thrown out of Glastonbury Abbey,

and they end up on an estate called Nanteos House.

Now, over time, they begin to confide

to their royal patron about a cup in their possession

made out of the true cross of Jesus,

and this cup, they argue, is the Holy Grail.

Problem with the Nanteos Cup is that

when the wood was dated,

it was found to be medieval.

The monks at Glastonbury

had been up to no good faking relics.

And then there's the cup of Antioch,

which traveled the world in the 1930s

as another possible candidate for the Holy Grail.

Well, it turned out to be a Roman oil lamp.

Most of these claims fall apart like that,

but there are contenders

which I think are worth looking into

a little more deeply.

[narrator] On the east coast of Spain,

in the city of Valencia's great cathedral,

there is a small chapel

with something very special inside.

[Tony] The Holy Grail in Valencia is a red agate cup,

relatively simple,

held in an ornate stem

with two ornate handles.

It's that core agate cup

that is of greatest interest.

We now know that it was made

between the 2nd century BC, the 1st century AD,

most likely in the Holy Land or Egypt.

So in terms of geographical location and age,

it really fits the bill.

That could indeed have been at the Last Supper.

If this is the Holy Grail,

it has indeed been on something of a journey

over the last 2000 years.

It began, most likely, in Jerusalem,

where it was taken, according to Church sources,

to Rome.

[narrator] But the cup was not safe there either.

In the 3rd century, the Roman Empire

was persecuting Christians.

In August 258,

the Emperor Valerian ordered the execution

of all bishops, priests, and deacons in Rome.

The Pope at the time, Sixtus II,

was quickly captured and executed.

But before he died, he entrusted

a young deacon named Lawrence

with the treasures of the church.

Knowing that relics like the Grail

were no longer safe in the city,

Lawrence saw to it that they were smuggled out.

It's said the Grail was then taken

to Lawrence's home in Spain.

There, it remained for hundreds of years

until a new threat emerged.

The early church undoubtedly thought

that the Holy Grail was safe.

But then, in the 8th century,

Spain is invaded by the Moors from North Africa,

who are not Christian.

And, believing that the Holy Grail

is once more in peril,

it's hidden away.

This sacred vessel was then taken

to a small hillside monastery, San Juan de la Peña,

where it stayed for something like 400 years

until it pops up in the year 1134

in an inventory of the monastery's goods,

and it's described as a vessel

which contained the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

[narrator] The Chalice remained at the monastery

in the mountains until 1399.

Then, Martin of Aragon

ordered the Holy Chalice moved to a private chapel

in his palace at Zaragoza.

From Zaragoza, the chalice was later taken

to Barcelona and then, in 1416, to Valencia.

[Tony] Having found its long-term home

in the cathedral in Valencia, the Catholic Church

seems to have more or less accepted

that this could be the Holy Grail,

and in recent times, it's even been used

in masses performed in the cathedral

by the late Pope John Paul II,

and by Pope Benedict the XVI.

The problem we have with Valencia's Holy Grail

is that it just disappears for centuries.

And the view that that is the Holy Grail

is challenged by an alternative account

from a man called Arculf.

[narrator] Arculf was a bishop from Germany.

In the late 7th century, he went on a pilgrimage.

Over a period of three years,

he traveled to Rome, Constantinople,

Jerusalem, and Alexandria.

But on his voyage home by sea,

his ship was struck by a storm

that forced him onto the rocky shores of Britain.

The shipwrecked bishop found his way to Iona,

a small island off the coast of Scotland,

where he was given shelter at a monastery.

Arculf told his story to the monks

and the abbot wrote it down.

"The chalice is silver

and has two handles on its sides.

The holy Arculf saw it and touched it

with his own hand.

All the people of the city

flock to it in veneration."

And the abbot, who's writing a book

about sacred things in sacred places,

notes down all the details.

The book that the abbot's writing is called

"De Locis Sanctis," in other words, Of Holy Places.

Now, he writes his account faithfully

of what his visitor has told him,

but we have to be very careful

because this is a second-hand account.

We don't know as well if Arculf is totally reliable,

let alone the abbott's transcript of what he says.

But if we believe this account, that creates a problem

for the chalice in the cathedral in Valencia.

If the cup Arculf described was the Grail

and it was in Jerusalem in the 7th century,

then the whole story about Pope Sixtus

sending the Grail away from Rome in the 3rd century

can't be true.

The whole story

behind the Valencia Chalice

falls apart.

[narrator] Bishop Arculf was not the only witness

to the Grail at Jerusalem.

It was reported there by a pilgrim

in the 6th century,

and as late as the 9th century,

there are records of two priests in the city

tasked with its care.

But how much we can trust these accounts,

and what happened to the Grail beyond that,

has long been a mystery.

[Tony] This is the problem that we have

over and over again with the Holy Grail.

That one story, one claimant to be the Holy Grail,

contradicts another.

They don't support each other's stories.

Either one is true or none is true.

And that's the mystery we're still trying to solve.

[narrator] During the First Crusade in 1099,

Jerusalem was captured by the Europeans.

Forty hundred and fifty years of Muslim rule came to an end.

But if the Crusaders found the Grail in the city,

there is no record of it.

The trail goes cold.

[Tony] The anticipation

of finding the holiest relics in Jerusalem

and being able to take them back to the West

was a huge, huge attraction for the crusaders.

Now, if they had found the Holy Grail,

I can't help believing

that that would have been celebrated

in every church

from Constantinople to Rome to Glastonbury

and down into Spain, you name it.

It's not something that they would have kept quiet.

[narrator] The cup seen by Arculf

and the other pilgrims in Jerusalem

seemed to have vanished.

For centuries, its fate was a mystery.

Then, in 2014,

two Spanish investigators

claimed to have tracked down the Holy Grail.

In their book "Kings of the Grail,"

Margarita Torres Sevilla and José Miguel Ortega del Río

argued that the holy cup was in Spain,

but not in Valencia.

So this new candidate for the Holy Grail

is the chalice of Doña Urraca,

who was the daughter of King Fernando I of Leon.

Now, it is two onyx bowls, essentially,

one this way, one that way,

and it's encrusted in jewels,

in gold,

an absolutely sumptuous

piece of medieval reliquary.

[narrator] Although the cup of Dona Urraca

has age, provenance, and a backstory,

there are still doubts.

[Tony] Although this is an outstanding example

of medieval craftsmanship,

the claim that it's the Holy Grail

had never been made for a thousand years

the cup had been sitting in the cathedral of Leon.

It's only been made recently.

The two Spanish researchers

examined medieval documents

in Egypt's National Library in Cairo.

The documents told a remarkable story.

To their astonishment, they came across documents

that showed that a sultan in Moorish-controlled Spain,

an area called Denia,

had sent grain to Fatimid-controlled Egypt

during a famine in Egypt.

And the gratitude of the Sultan in Egypt

was such that he sent back

a whole load of treasure

to this sultan in Spain,

pointing out that amidst this treasure

was the Holy Grail.

Now, the instruction from the Sultan in Egypt

to his counterpart in Denia in Spain

was to send the Holy Grail on to King Fernando I of Leon,

as a kind of diplomatic gift with the message,

lay off trying to invade us,

we've just given you the Holy Grail.

[narrator] And in León, the Grail supposedly remained,

hidden in plain sight,

its true identity concealed

in gold and jewels to protect it.

The claims of the two Spanish researchers

made headlines around the world.

And from the evidence our team

of truthseekers have collected,

Tony feels their claims have some merit.

[Tony] Of all the theories,

it's the cup in Leon that does it for me

because it would have been,

the cup would have been in the Holy Sepulchre,

that most sacred of churches.

That is then sacked by Al-Hakam,

who levels the Holy Sepulchre to the ground

and takes all the booty,

and you can bet he took the Holy Grail.

It ends up with another sultan in Egypt.

And that sultan, then sends it, as we said,

as a diplomatic gift to the king of Leon.

So the idea of the Grail ending up

in that part of the world,

a part of the world that's very sacred

to medieval Christians,

and having been gifted by somebody who got it

off a man who'd leveled the Holy Sepulchre,

which is more than likely where it was,

I'm seeing the Leon connections as being very strong.

[narrator] The Holy Grail continues to convince,

confound, and intrigue us,

just as it has done in the past.

Whatever the Holy Grail is,

whether it is a cup or a stone, or a plate,

it's what that term means to us.

It touches us emotionally.

It takes us back centuries

to the time of Jesus Christ right to the crucifixion.

[Karen] The Grail is perhaps unique

in being one of those iconic artifacts

which many people have sought to find,

but for just vastly different reasons.

[Mark] For a lot of people, the Grail is,

it's a very tangible, very real element

that connects them to Jesus.

So it's really a visceral element

that connects us to a material object

of religious value.

And that's why it's endured.

From the knights of the Round Table

right through to the present day,

the search for the Grail

is the search by us flawed humans

for something pure,

something that's perhaps impossible,

but something that we can't help but look for.

To touch the divine.

[solemn music playing]