Templar Reborn In Portugal Sailed To Oak Island! | The Curse of Oak Island Season 13 Episode 23

Templar reborn in Portugal sailed to Oak Island. The year is 1307. It is a Friday, the 13th of October to be precise.
And at dawn across the entire kingdom of France, the doors of every Knights Templar preceptory are being kicked in simultaneously.
The arrests had been coordinated to the hour.
King Philip IV of France, the man who owed the Templars more money than he could ever repay, had finally found a way to make that debt disappear.
Torture, false confessions, papal collusion.
Mass execution. The most powerful military religious order in the medieval world was being destroyed in a single morning, but the treasure was already gone.
Templar preceptor Jean de Chalons testified before the papal inquisition that brother Gerard de Villiers, master of France, had received advanced warning.
He had fled with 50 horses and put to sea with 18 galleys, and he was not alone.
Hugues de Chalons went with him, carrying the entire accumulated treasury of Hugues de Payraud, the man who controlled every Templar account, every Templar deposit, and every Templar secret across Europe.
A second papal document confirmed it. 18 galleys, an armed escort, the complete treasure of the Knights Templar sailing away from France on the same night the arrests began.
The galleys were never seen again. The treasure was never recovered.
And for 700 years, the question of where it went has been one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the history of the world.
I believe, and the evidence uncovered in season 13 of The Curse of Oak Island is beginning to make a very strong case, that it went to a small, unremarkable-looking island off the coast of Nova Scotia.
And the people who brought it there were not the original Knights Templar. They were something more enduring, more

sophisticated, and far less well known.
They were the Order of Christ, the Templars reborn in Portugal, the secret order that sailed to Oak Island and buried something so significant, so sacred, and so irreplaceable, that they engineered one of the most complex concealment systems in human history to protect it.
This is that story, and it is the most important video I have made on this channel. If you are new here, welcome.
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I am glad you are here. Now, let’s go back to the beginning. To understand how the Order of Christ fits into the Oak Island story, you need to understand who the Knights Templar actually were.
Not the Hollywood version, not the conspiracy theory version, the historical version, because the historical version is stranger and more compelling than any of those.
The Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon were founded in Jerusalem around 1119 AD.
Nine knights led by Hugues de Payens of Champagne pledged to protect Christian pilgrims on the roads between Jaffa and Jerusalem.
King Baldwin II gave them quarters in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which sat on the former site of Solomon’s Temple, and it was from this location that they took their name.
For the first decade, they numbered fewer than 20 men. They were obscure, underfunded, and largely unknown outside Jerusalem. Then Bernard of Clairvaux took an interest.
Bernard was the most influential churchman in 12th century Europe, an uncle to one of the original nine knights, and a man whose word to the papacy carried the weight of law.
He secured official recognition for the order at the Council of Troyes in 1129.
He wrote their rule.
He solved the central theological problem that had made crusading uncomfortable for devout Christians.
Could a monk be a killer?
His answer, laid out in his treatise in praise of the new knighthood, was unambiguous. Holy killing was not just permissible, it was a duty. The effect was immediate and total.
Donations of land, property, and gold flooded in from across Europe. The King of Aragon bequeathed a third of his entire kingdom to the order.
By 1139, Pope Innocent II had issued the bull Omne Datum Optimum, exempting the Templars from every tax, every local authority, and every law except that of the Pope himself.
Within 30 years of their founding, the Templars had become the bankers of medieval Europe.
They ran an international financial system that would be recognizable to a modern economist. Letters of credit, asset management, international transfers.
They maintained a fleet of ships capable of crossing the Mediterranean.
They transported priceless artifacts across vast distances. Historical records confirm that in 1254, they shipped holy relics from the crusader port of Acre to southern France aboard a vessel called the Monge.
They owned preceptories, commanderies, and estates in nine provinces stretching from Portugal to the Levant.
No organization in the medieval world, apart from the Catholic Church itself, operated on this scale. And they had access, deep, privileged, unprecedented access to the most sacred sites in Christendom.
They were garrisoned on Temple Mount itself. They excavated beneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
They were present in Jerusalem during the crusades when relics of staggering significance, fragments of the true cross, objects connected to the crucifixion itself, were circulating among the highest levels of Christian power.
Whatever the Templars found, or received, or were entrusted to protect, they had both the infrastructure and the motive to move it anywhere in the known world. Now, let me tell you where they moved it.
But first, drop your name and where you are watching from in the comments right now. I am not joking when I say I read every single one.
Whether you are watching from Canada, from the United Kingdom, from Pakistan, from Australia, from the United States, from anywhere on this planet, tell me who you are and where you are sitting.
This community spans the entire globe, and I want to see it. Tell me your name.
Tell me your country. Go now. The dissolution. On Friday, October 13, 1307, Philip IV of France struck.
His motivations were not theological. He owed the Templars enormous sums, and he wanted them gone. The mass arrests began at dawn.
Over the following weeks, hundreds of knights were tortured into confessing crimes they had not committed. Heresy, blasphemy, the worship of a severed head, the denial of Christ.
The confessions were extracted under conditions of unimaginable brutality.
Grand Master Jacques de Molay was held for 7 years before being burned alive on an island in the Seine in 1314.
The order was formally dissolved at the Council of Vienne in 1312.
Pope Clement V issued a papal bull ordering every Christian kingdom to arrest remaining Templars and seize their assets.
Almost every kingdom complied. The arrests were carried out across France, England, Italy, the German states, the Iberian Peninsula.
Assets were transferred to the Knights Hospitaller, or in some cases simply absorbed by local rulers. Almost every kingdom complied, but Portugal did not.
King Dinis I of Portugal, known to his people as the poet king, a man of unusual intelligence and political sophistication, refused to enforce the papal decree.
He did not arrest the Templars in his kingdom. He did not seize their assets.
He did not transfer their properties to the Hospitallers. Instead, he did something far more clever. He negotiated.
And what he negotiated was one of the most remarkable institutional survivals in the history of the western world.
In 1319, with full papal recognition from Pope John XXII, the Order Militaris Christi, the Military Order of Christ, was formally established in Portugal.
It was headquartered initially at Castro Marim in the south, but by 1356, it had returned to the Convento de Cristo at Tomar, the old Templar headquarters.
The personnel were the same.
The properties were the same. The fortress was the same. The assets were the same. What changed was the name. The institution itself was continuous, unbroken, alive.
In my honest assessment, this is the most underappreciated fact in the entire history of the Knights Templar. The suppression in 1312 was not the end of the order. It was a rebranding.
In Portugal, the Templars simply became the Order of Christ, continued operating from the same buildings with the same people under the same organizational structure, and proceeded to do something the original Templars never managed. They sailed to the New World.
And I think that matters enormously for understanding Oak Island.
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The Order of Christ became the engine of Portugal’s Age of Discovery.
Their distinctive red cross, the Cross of Christ, direct descendant of the Templar cross, flew on the sails of every Portuguese ship that sailed into the unknown Atlantic.
Prince Henry the Navigator, who became administrator of the Order of Christ in 1420, used the order’s vast inherited Templar wealth to fund the most ambitious maritime program in human history.
A papal bull issued by Nicholas V in 1454, reinforced by Calixtus III in 1456.
Placed all overseas Catholic missions under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the prior of Santa Maria do Olival in Tomar.
In practice, this meant that every church built in Portuguese territories from Brazil to India answered to the Order of Christ.
When Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, he sailed under their cross.
When Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, their cross was on his sail.
When Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed Brazil in 1500, it was under the cross of Christ.
When Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition completed the first circumnavigation of the globe, the cross of the Order of Christ went with it.
And when Portuguese ships first reached the Azores, those nine volcanic islands sitting alone in the middle of the Atlantic, roughly a third of the way between Portugal and North America, it was an Order of Christ knight who formally claimed them.
Now, here is where the Oak Island connection begins to crystallize into something genuinely extraordinary.
The Azores did not appear in European geography in 1427.
They appeared on maps decades earlier.
Researcher Emiliano Sacchetti presented historical maps to the Oak Island team in season 13, episode 22, Road Trip, that dated from 1339 to 1385, a full 60 to 90 years before the supposed official Portuguese discovery.
Someone already knew about those islands. Someone was already sailing there.
And in the context of the Order of Christ and their maritime capabilities and their organizational sophistication, the identity of that someone is not a great mystery.
The Azores were strategically located.
Sit with a map for a moment. The Azores are positioned almost exactly at the midpoint of the Atlantic.
From the Azores heading west, the prevailing currents and winds of the North Atlantic Gyre would carry a well-provisioned ship directly toward the shores of North America.
Specifically, toward the coast of the region that would eventually be called Nova Scotia.
A Portuguese navigator following the North Atlantic circular current westward from the Azores would arrive, with reasonable consistency, somewhere on the coastline of maritime Canada.
And the evidence now recovered from Oak Island says that someone did exactly that.
In season 13, episode 22, Professor Robert Restall of Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, presented his geological analysis of three stone shots recovered from Oak Island.
Stone shots, small, perfectly round medieval cannonballs of the type that were replaced by cast iron munitions in the late 1500s.
Two of those stone shots came from deep inside the money pit itself, from over 100 ft underground. One came from the Peacock, one shaft near the money pit area.
Professor Restall’s analysis of the volcanic mineral composition of these stones pointed to one place of origin, the Portuguese Azores. Medieval weapons from the Azores found deep inside the money pit in a deposit that Marty Lagina described as 90% likely to date to the 1300s or early 1400s.
Historian Doug Crowell asked the question that everyone in that war room was thinking. Why would armed men carrying medieval Azorean stone cannonballs be at the money pit?
And his answer was careful and correct.
Those depositing material in the money pit may have needed armed protection.
What they were burying was worth guarding with lethal force.
What kind of object requires an armed guard and a 100-ft deep engineered vault on a remote island in the North Atlantic? Not gold bullion.
Gold bullion does not require a sacred symbol to be encoded into a map to mark its location seven centuries later.
Gold bullion does not motivate an organization to build one of the most sophisticated flood tunnel concealment systems in human history.
Gold bullion is precious, but it is not sacred.
And the evidence at Oak Island points toward something sacred.
This is where the documentary trail, the archaeological evidence, and the physical artifacts found on Oak Island begin to converge on a conclusion that is genuinely difficult to dismiss.
And I want to walk you through all of it because you deserve the complete picture, not just the headlines.
Now, let me tell you about the Portuguese family that lived in Mahone Bay for 75 years. Because this is the part of the Oak Island story that almost nobody talks about.
And it may be the single most important piece of documentary evidence in the entire investigation.
Between 1508 and 1583, that is 75 consecutive years, a Portuguese family from the island of Terceira in the Azores maintained a settlement in the waters of what is now Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia.
Their name was the Pinheiro de Barcelos family. And the documentary record of their presence is not rumor or legend or theory.
It is preserved in royal charters, notarial records, personal wills, and contemporary Portuguese maps.
It begins with Pero de Barcelos, a settler from Terceira who sailed with João Fernandes Lavrador between 1492 and 1495 on a voyage commissioned by King João III to the Northwest Atlantic.
Pero’s son Diogo received a royal letter of grace from King Manuel I in 1508, formally acknowledging his father’s role in the discovery of the North.
Under a later royal charter from King João III, Diogo and his son Manuel discovered certain islands and lands across the North Atlantic between 1521 and 1531 at their own expense.
In October 1531, Diogo wrote to his brother Afonso inviting him to join a new expedition with two rented ships.
The stated purpose, to winter there and experiment with settlement.
In 1562 and 1563, Manuel de Barcelos Machado sent two ships to a location he called Barcelona carrying cattle and pigs to initiate colonization.
He sent additional ships with sheep and goats in 1565 and 1566.
Witnesses testified the animals were thriving.
Manuel petitioned the Portuguese crown in 1568 stating that he and his late father had already invested over 5,000 cruzados in the project and that they had established breeding herds of livestock on the island.
And the maps confirm it.
Between 1560 and 1561, the royal Portuguese cosmographer Bartolomeu Velho depicted Ilha Barcelona in a gulf on the coast of Nova Scotia at approximately 44.5° North latitude.
That is the latitude of Mahone Bay. One of Velho’s charts names the discoverers directly.
The legend reads, and I’m translating from the Portuguese, Barcelona Islands because those who discovered them were from Barcelos.
Mahone Bay, home of Oak Island.
Named on a 16th-century Portuguese royal map, settled for 75 years by an Azorean family on an island they named for the patron saint of the Knights Templar.
That last detail is not incidental. The island was called Ilha Barcelona de São Bernardo, Saint Bernard, Bernard of Clairvaux, the man who wrote the Knights Templar’s rule.
The man who secured their papal recognition, the patron saint of the Templar Order honored in the name of the island where the Order of Christ maintained a settlement for three quarters of a century.
If that does not stop you in your tracks, I do not know what will. Before we go any further, share this video with someone right now.
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Now, let me bring this back to Oak Island itself, to the physical evidence that ties everything together.
Because the theory only becomes a case when the objects found in the ground match the story told by the documents.
And on Oak Island, the objects match.
Nine artifacts and structures have been independently dated to between 1100 and 1300 AD, the exact period of Knights Templar power.
Let me go through the most significant ones because each one carries its own weight, and together they form something overwhelming.
Coconut fiber recovered from the money pit was analyzed by both Beta Analytic and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, two independent laboratories using different samples.
Three separate tests returned calibrated date ranges collectively spanning 1036 to 1374 AD.
Coconut fiber is not native to Nova Scotia.
It is a tropical material that requires long-distance maritime transport to arrive on an island in the North Atlantic. Someone brought it there from the tropics in the 1100s, four centuries before Columbus.
A stone wharf discovered in the triangular swamp, a paved surface at water level, was carbon-dated using wood recovered from beneath the paving to approximately 1200 AD with a range of 1150 to 1250.
This is a landing area, a place where boats were loaded or unloaded, built 800 years ago on a small island in Mahone Bay by people who needed a place to receive and dispatch cargo.
A lead cross discovered by Gary Drayton near Smith’s Cove in 2017 was analyzed by Tobias Skowronek of the German Mining Museum and dated to between 900 and 1300 AD.
Lead isotope analysis traced the metal to medieval mines in the Cévennes and Montagne Noire regions of southern France. Regions where the Knights Templar maintained significant estates and operations.
A devotional cross, medieval, French, on an island in Nova Scotia centuries before any documented European settlement in the region.
Nolan’s Cross, five massive boulders arranged in the shape of a Christian cross, spanning 720 feet across the interior of Oak Island, was analyzed by archaeoastronomer Professor Adriano Gasperini, who dated the placement of the boulders to approximately 1217 AD, with a working range of 1125 to 1275.
A monumental astronomical cross, surveyed with precision, built on a remote Atlantic island in the early 13th century.
A crossbow bolt recovered from the island was typologically dated by the Ladby Viking Museum to the medieval period, approximately 1200 to 1299 AD.
A crossbow bolt is a military object.
Someone from medieval Europe stood on Oak Island carrying a weapon.
A hand-wrought iron spike from Lot 5 was dated by archaeometallurgist Emma Culligan to 1100 to 1330 AD based on its forging characteristics.
And in season 13, the Lot 8 boulder, a 40,000-lb stone that the team lifted by crane, revealing beneath it a deliberately constructed stone platform bonded with a mortar-like material.
Archaeo-metallurgist Emma Culligan and soil scientist Dr. Ian Spooner identified the platform as constructed, not natural.
The mortar-like material was dated to between the post-1200s and the pre-1800s. The platform is cradle-shaped, deliberate, intentional.
Hidden under a boulder placed there by people who expected it to stay hidden.
This is not one piece of evidence.
This is nine independent data points from multiple disciplines, radiocarbon dating, archaeoastronomy, metallurgical analysis, lead isotope testing.
Typological comparison all pointing at the same 200-year window.
The medieval period, the era of the Knights Templar and the early Order of Christ.
My personal read on this data set is simple and direct.
The probability that nine independent analyses from nine different research methods and nine different analytical teams all coincidentally return the same 200-year medieval window without any actual medieval presence on Oak Island approaches zero.
This is not a lucky coincidence. This is a pattern and patterns tell stories.
The story this pattern tells is one of an organization disciplined, wealthy, spiritually motivated, maritimately capable that came to Oak Island in the medieval period.
Built infrastructure designed to last for centuries, concealed something of immense value and possibly sacred significance, marked the location with an astronomical cross of boulders.
Left a devotional lead cross as a spiritual marker, armed its operation with stone shots from the Azores, and sailed away with the intention that what they buried would stay buried until those who knew how to find it came looking.
Now, let me tell you what I think ties it all together because we have the Templar history, we have the Order of Christ, we have the Azorean stone shots.
We have the Barcelos family settlement at Mahone Bay. We have the nine medieval dated artifacts and structures.
But there is one more piece that season 13 added to this picture. And in my view, it may be the most extraordinary piece of evidence the show has ever aired.
In season 13, episode 21, a sacred symbol, researcher Scott Clark, a 32nd degree Mason with deep knowledge of Templar and Masonic symbology, appeared in the war room with a presentation titled From Nazareth to Nova Scotia.
On the 1762 map of Mahone Bay drawn by Surveyor General Charles Morris, Clark identified a letter A with a V-shaped crossbar.
When the crossbar is extended as a sightline across the map, it points directly at Oak Island.
Clark then showed where else that same symbol appears.
The Titulus Crucis, the wooden tablet housed in Rome’s Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, is believed by many to be the actual plaque placed above the head of Jesus Christ during the crucifixion, the sign declaring him king of the Jews.
And on that tablet is the same A-shaped symbol with a V-shaped crossbar found on the Morris map of Nova Scotia. Same symbol, a 1762 map of Mahone Bay, and a relic believed to have been present at the crucifixion.
Clark connected it to A-shaped carvings photographed by Corjan Moll at the Convent of Christ in Tomar, the Order of Christ headquarters, the former Templar stronghold.
He connected it to pentacles on Portuguese Templar gravestones. He noted that Portugal and the Azores are among the only regions whose flags incorporate the five wounds of Christ.
And he concluded that a piece of the true cross, a fragment of the wood on which Jesus Christ was crucified, may have been brought across the Atlantic by the Order of Christ and buried on Oak Island.
I want to be honest with you about my personal position here because I think you deserve straight talk rather than manufactured suspense.
I cannot tell you that a fragment of the true cross is in the money pit. Nobody can tell you that yet.
What I can tell you is this. The combination of the sacred symbol on the Morris map connecting to the Titulus Crucis, the Order of Christ’s documented role as guardians of sacred Christian relics, and their direct Templar inheritance, the presence of their architectural signature on both the Azores and Oak Island, the documentary proof of a Portuguese Azorean settlement named for the patron saint of the Templars in Mahone Bay for 75 years, and nine medieval dated artifacts independently pointing to the same 200-year window, all of that together constitutes the most coherent and substantive argument for the identity of whoever built the money pit that this investigation has ever produced.
The Templars did not die in 1312. They were reborn in Portugal. They sailed to the New World under the Cross of Christ.
They lived for 75 years in Mahone Bay on an island named for Bernard of Clairvaux.
And I believe, as my honest personal assessment of the evidence, that they buried something on Oak Island that they had crossed an ocean to protect.
Something sacred enough to be worth building one of the most extraordinary concealment systems in human history.
Something that armed men with Azorean stone cannonballs stood guard over while it was being placed 100 feet underground.
Whatever it is, it has been waiting down there for between five and seven centuries.
And season 13 of The Curse of Oak Island is the closest any human being has come to it in 230 years of searching. Before you go anywhere, I want to ask you something directly.
What do you believe is buried on Oak Island?
After everything we have covered today, the Templar history, the Order of Christ, the Barcelos family settlement, the nine medieval dated artifacts, the sacred symbol connecting a Nova Scotia map to a crucifixion relic, what is your honest theory?
Drop it in the comments right now. Tell me your name and where in the world you are watching from. I will be in the comments reading and responding to every single one.
This community is one of the most thoughtful and knowledgeable groups of history lovers anywhere on the internet, and I genuinely want to see what you think.
And if this video gave you something new, a piece of history you had not encountered before, a connection you had not seen made, a reason to look at this mystery differently, then do one thing for me.
Hit subscribe and ring the notification bell because there is more coming.
Season 13 is heading into its final two episodes, and based on everything that has been built over 23 episodes of evidence and discovery, the finale is going to be unlike anything this show has aired in 13 seasons.
You do not want to miss it. 230 years of searching, nine independent medieval dates, a 75-year Portuguese settlement in Mahone Bay, stone shots from the Azores in the money pit, a sacred symbol connecting Nova Scotia to the crucifixion, and two brothers from Michigan who refused to stop digging.
The Templars were reborn in Portugal, and I believe they sailed to Oak Island.
Keep digging.