Middle Ages

The Middle Ages in the novel are at once a historical setting and a screen onto which later characters project a lost center of power. The Templars’ emergence as defenders of pilgrims, their wealth and political independence, and their association with the Grail supply a chain of historical materials from which a modern secret history is constructed. But the narrator’s reflections also expose the danger of treating every ambiguity as evidence of a hidden design: the period matters not only for what happened in it, but for how the living reuse it to make the world seem legible.

Historical beginnings and Templar power

The account of the Templars begins with the aftermath of the First Crusade. Godefroy fulfills his vow at the Holy Sepulcher, and Baudouin becomes the first king of Jerusalem. Holding the city, however, does not mean that the surrounding region is secure: the Saracens remain a force, while the new Christian rulers and pilgrims face continuing difficulties. Against this unsettled background, nine young men arrive in Jerusalem in 1118 under Hugues de Payns and establish the nucleus of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ. Their order combines monastic vows—poverty, chastity, and obedience—with a further commitment to defend pilgrims. The king, the bishop, and others support them, and they are housed in the cloister of the old Temple of Solomon. From that association comes their name, the Knights of the Temple.

The later account shifts from founding purpose to institutional power. After the Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land collapse, the Templars are described as having lost their original task, or as having turned the means of fulfilling it into an end. Their immense wealth, landholdings, military force, and exemptions make them difficult for a king to control. The grand master is portrayed as a prince-like figure with extensive authority, while the Paris Temple houses the French treasury beyond the king’s direct reach. Templars administer money in the king’s name, handle payments, and manipulate interest, functioning like a powerful private bank with privileges associated with a state institution. The king’s own treasurer is a Templar. The narrative thereby makes the order’s political and financial independence a concrete source of conflict, rather than merely a mysterious quality.

A medieval past recruited into the Plan

The Templars’ history becomes the foundation for the Colonel’s interpretation of the alleged Provins document. He presents an account in which medieval initiates possessed secret knowledge, links them to ancient Celtic wisdom, and claims that Johannes Trithemius learned their cryptographic methods. The text is introduced through a photocopy: the Colonel argues that Ingolf’s transcription should count as the original because he sees no reason to suppose it false. Casaubon objects that Ingolf may have made errors, while Belbo refuses to accept the Colonel’s confidence as a substitute for examining the copy. Their disagreement makes the document’s transmission part of the evidence problem from the outset: the copy’s status is asserted, not independently established.

The Colonel’s proposed decoding gives the medieval connection an apparently precise form. He says he tried one of Trithemius’s forty major systems, counting only the first letter of each word. That sequence still produced nonsense, so he treated it as a further coded message and applied the simplest of ten minor systems: a wheel that shifts each letter backward by one position for encoding, and forward by one for decoding. He reports obtaining the French phrase “Les 36 inuisibles separez en six bandes,” which he translates as thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups. In his reading, it announces the formation of a secret group. Yet the steps do not establish that the original Templars wrote the message, that Ingolf’s copy accurately reproduces an ancient text, or that the decoded phrase proves the Colonel’s larger theory. The novel preserves the difference between a decipherment claimed to work and the historical conclusions built upon it.

The same interpretive expansion draws the Grail into the supposed Templar objective. The Colonel invokes traditions in which the Grail is a chalice, a stone, a source of power, or a symbol associated with the philosopher’s stone. He cites Wolfram von Eschenbach’s account of the Grail being kept in a Templar castle and treats the phrase lapis exillis as evidence for a stone from heaven or exile, perhaps even a meteorite. From these possibilities he concludes that the Grail represents the objective of the Plan. Casaubon’s response is narrower: the document, as he understands it, says that the knights’ sixth meeting would take place near or above a stone; it does not instruct them to find one. That distinction marks the gap between a medieval reference and the elaborate meaning assigned to it.

The Middle Ages as an imagined center

A passage cited from Julius Evola gives the medieval setting a broader symbolic role. In this vision, the Middle Ages await a Grail hero and imagine the head of the Holy Roman Empire becoming the visible manifestation of the “King of the World.” The invisible emperor is to become visible; the medieval period becomes “middle” in the sense of a central, inviolable point; and a returning hero is expected to restore what has been lost. The Colonel presents this as living truth rather than romantic fantasy. The passage thus supplies the Plan with more than a set of historical clues: it offers a model of history organized around a hidden sovereign center and a future restoration.

The novel places this vision beside the narrator’s more skeptical account of historical interpretation. Remembering a trial marked by silences, contradictions, and apparent stupidity, he recalls once believing that stupidity explained the enigma. Later, he comes to suspect that the most terrible enigmas can disguise themselves as madness, and finally considers the whole world an enigma made frightening by the human attempt to force it to disclose an underlying truth. This reflection complicates the Colonel’s confidence. Medieval events and texts may remain ambiguous without forming a single concealed system, and the desire to make every fragment point toward a center can itself turn uncertainty into a source of delusion.

Afterlives in modernity

The Middle Ages also persist in the novel as a reference point for apparently modern intellectual life. After setting aside resemblances and returning to academic work, the narrator studies Renaissance philosophers and finds that the secular figures who emerged from the medieval past devoted themselves to cabala and magic. The observation unsettles any simple story in which modernity cleanly leaves medieval thought behind. It does not, by itself, prove an unbroken secret tradition; instead, it shows how practices and interests associated with occult knowledge can recur within the culture of the Renaissance and later periods.

That recurrence is expressed through imagery of creation as well as through historical argument. In a discussion of Isaac Luria’s account of the Breaking of the Vessels, creation is described as divine inhalation and exhalation: God takes a breath and releases the light of the ten Sefirot. The account turns cosmology into a bodily process and presents creation as a fragile act rather than a settled, finished order. Set beside the novel’s medieval histories, it helps explain why the past remains so available to the characters’ speculations: it offers images of lost unity, broken structure, and concealed knowledge. The Middle Ages therefore operate both as a period of institutions and conflict and as a powerful interpretive construction—one that can illuminate later history, but can also be made to confirm a Plan that the evidence does not establish.