| Inhalt Bornholm is a tiny island in the Baltic sea barely twenty miles by ten. Its fifteen extraordinary mediaeval churches and many hundreds of standing stones mark the island out as a sacred site since remote antiquity. These ancient markers - and especially the churches - demonstrate a brilliant and unexpected skill in land surveying, geometry and mathematics. The Templars' Secret Island describes the intriguing links between mediaeval Scandinavia, France and Jerusalem. How men of influence such as Bernard of Clairvaux, the Templar Grand Master Bertrand de Blanchefort and a Danish bishop all worked together in the twelfth century to preserve a fantastic secret. The trail has spanned Europe and has led as far as ancient Palestine. A further twist came when the authors found that in 1911 a forgotten Swedish-led expedition had burrowed beneath the City of David, echoing the activities of the fabled Knights Templar, almost eight hundred years earlier. What that expedition unearthed forms a bridge to the island two thousand miles away. The Bornholm churches also show a brilliant approach to one of the great - and still unsolved - mathematical puzzles of antiquity, which has taxed the ingenuity of scholars such as Descartes through the centuries. The authors' discoveries have also led to a link with the village of Rennes-le-Château - a place with its own enigmatic mysteries - and this book reveals how those two specks upon the surface of the earth are tied indissolubly together. They both appear to have been touched by the hands of master builders who shared a common expertise and a common body of knowledge - as well as a common desire to find secret hiding places for their treasures. The authors' collaboration began when Erling Haagensen, born on Bornholm, began to recognise the strange history of the churches on his island home and contacted Henry Lincoln whose researches on Rennes-le-Château had already provided the first glimpse of the facts underlying the story of this secret island in the Baltic. The Authors Erling Haagensen (on the right, above) lives and works on the island of Bornholm. He is a well-known documentary film maker in Denmark and has made several hundred television programmes. In 1992 he produced and directed for TV-2 Danmark a four-part series The Secret of the Knights Templar which was written and presented by Henry Lincoln. This was later shown all over the world by the Discovery channel. The Templars' Secret Island is based on more than ten years of research and a shorter version of it was first published in Denmark in 1993. The present English version contains further research and is a close collaboration with Henry Lincoln. Henry Lincoln began his career in the theatre and first wrote for television in the early 1960s. He encountered the mystery of Rennes-le-Château in 1969, which led to his first BBC documentary film. In the three decades since he has concentrated, almost exclusively on writing historical documentary scripts and four books delving into the secrets of Rennes-le-Château. They include his most recent work Key to the Sacred Pattern, the bestselling The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy (co-authored with Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent). | 
