Crusaders of Christ

The Order of Christ is the Portuguese order into which the Templars were transformed after their suppression, and whose fortified home at Tomar becomes, for Casaubon, the first actual site in the secret history he is piecing together. The order’s historical continuity and the castle’s layered architecture give his theory an unusually tangible anchor; his discovery also marks a turn from treating the Provins message as a joke to treating it as a map of a six-hundred-year Plan.

Origins and Historical Position

Casaubon’s account places the Order of Christ in Portugal after the king and the pope saved the Templars from trial and ruin by transforming them into a new order. The survivors withdrew to Tomar, where, in the novel’s reconstruction, they enjoyed freedom and continued institutional life rather than disappearing. The castle thus carries two histories at once: it is a Portuguese stronghold and the proposed refuge of the Templar continuity imagined by Casaubon.

The order prospered at Tomar for centuries. Casaubon notes the tradition associating both Henry the Navigator and Christopher Columbus with it, and describes its maritime enterprise as contributing to Portugal’s fortune. Its long occupation also altered the castle: medieval structures were joined by Renaissance and Baroque additions. Rather than presenting an untouched medieval relic, the site embodies an institution extended and reshaped over time.

Tomar and the Material Record

Casaubon reaches Tomar after a conference in Coimbra, travelling with Brazilian comrades who debate whether the group should visit Fatima or the castle. His preference is decisive: he cannot miss a Templar site. The approach follows a fortified road beside outer bastions marked by cruciform slits, and the church contains an octagonal rotunda modeled on the Holy Sepulcher. The crosses on the buildings vary in form, reflecting periods and local traditions; Casaubon recognizes that this very variation helps explain why Templar hunters so readily treat almost any cross as evidence of the order.

Other details invite connections beyond the castle’s straightforward history. A Manueline window gathers marine and submarine imagery—seaweed, shells, anchors, capstans, and chains—into a celebration of oceanic achievement. Its towers bear the insignia of the Garter, while another side displays the Golden Fleece. Casaubon links these signs into an associative chain joining the Garter, the Fleece, the Argonauts, the Grail, and the Templars. The guide cannot explain the English insignia’s presence, leaving an evidentiary gap that Casaubon fills with a theory of concealed alliances.

The crypt intensifies the sense of a designed initiatory space. After seven steps, a bare stone floor leads toward an apse; access passes beneath seven rose-shaped keystones, each larger than the last, with the final one above a well. The guide says occult visitors make pilgrimages there and that the chamber is reputed to have served for initiation. Casaubon sees the Cross and the Rose together in a Templar monastery that predates the Rosicrucian manifestos, turning architecture into an apparent bridge between historical orders and later esoteric traditions.

A chance entry into an unrestored room yields another fragment: dusty furniture, large cardboard boxes, and pieces of books in Hebrew, apparently from the seventeenth century. The guide explains that the knights had friendly relations with the local Jewish community and points out a small, elegant French-style maze garden designed by the eighteenth-century Jewish architect Samuel Schwarz. These facts give Tomar a record of contact and coexistence, but Casaubon’s attention is drawn to their potential place in a larger pattern.

The Castle as the First Meeting Place

Casaubon rereads the Provins message through what he has seen at Tomar. Its references to a second appointment in Jerusalem and a first meeting at a castle prompt him to identify the Castle of the Ordonation not with Monsalvat or the Hyperborean Avalon of chivalric romance, but with Tomar. In his reasoning, the Templars of Provins would have chosen a practical stronghold familiar to an order that managed commanderies, not a castle borrowed from Arthurian literature. Tomar’s supposed guarantees of safety, freedom, and contact with agents of a second group make it fit the message’s language.

The identification changes Casaubon’s relation to the evidence. Leaving Tomar, he no longer laughs at Colonel Ardenti’s message: he concludes that the Templars, once a secret order, devised a Plan meant to last six hundred years and conclude in the present century. He insists that a castle in the message must mean a real castle, and proposes Tomar as the Plan’s beginning. The sites named by Ardenti—Stonehenge, Avalon, and Agarttha—now seem to him inadequate or fantastic; the document must be studied anew.

Yet the novel exposes the instability beneath this conviction. Casaubon reminds himself that the task is not to discover the Templars’ secret but to construct it. Back in Milan, Belbo reluctantly retrieves the document from a lower drawer, where he has kept it, and the two men reread the Provins message together. Tomar has not independently proven the Plan; rather, its architecture, emblems, traditions, and unexplained details have supplied Casaubon with a persuasive structure for interpreting the message.

Later Place in the Reconstructed Plan

In the men’s later account of the Rosicrucian period, Tomar returns as more than Casaubon’s private discovery. He connects the Golden Fleece and Garter emblems at the castle with symbols displayed during festivities in Heidelberg, where an allegorical float presents the bridegroom as Jason. The repeated insignia become, in the group’s interpretation, signs that English Templars and German allies were attempting to reunite lines of an interrupted Plan through the Rosicrucian manifestos.

The Order of Christ also appears in the chronology the men devise. Casaubon says that a chapter met at Tomar in 1619 after forty-six years of silence, having last met in 1573. He speculates that the earlier gathering may have prepared, with the English, for the proposed 1584 journey; after the Rosicrucian manifestos, the 1619 chapter supposedly reconvened to decide whether to join the English operation or pursue another course. The narrative presents this as an interpretation assembled from the group’s materials, not as independently verified history.

Tomar consequently occupies a double role. It is a real Portuguese castle with a long institutional and architectural history, and it becomes the first fixed point in Casaubon’s imagined network of secret meetings. Its tangible features make the Plan feel recoverable; the very process by which Casaubon joins them, however, illustrates how the characters’ habit of connecting symbols can convert historical complexity into an apparently unanswerable conspiracy.