The Chapter of the Knights of Christ at Tomar is a gathering that the novel’s narrators insert into their speculative history of secret societies. Held in 1619 after forty-six years without a chapter, it becomes a possible point of decision: the order may have weighed cooperation with an English operation or a separate course. The evidence establishes that this is the characters’ conjectural reconstruction, not a documented revelation of what the meeting decided.

Background and timing

The chapter is placed in the unsettled aftermath of the Rosicrucian manifestos. In the characters’ account, a previous chapter met in 1573, eleven years before the supposed English-French meeting of 1584; the 1619 gathering follows a further interval of silence. The sequence gives the meeting a plausible historical framework while leaving its actual agenda open to interpretation.

The proposed choice

Casaubon describes the 1619 chapter as convening to decide what line the Knights of Christ should take: whether to join the English operation or attempt another path. The possibility of competing strategies matters more than any settled result. Belbo pictures the supposed participants as people lost in a maze, each choosing a direction and unable to tell whether a reply comes from another group or merely echoes their own uncertainty.

Place in the invented Plan

The meeting helps the three researchers extend their Plan across organizations and periods, linking the Knights of Christ to the English operation and to the Rosicrucian controversy. Yet the scene also exposes the limits of their reconstruction: Diotallevi admits that they do not know what the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites were doing at the time. Rather than resolving the gaps, the Plan absorbs them as further branches in a concealed history. The Tomar chapter thus marks both a supposed strategic turning point and the narrative’s movement from historical fragments into self-reinforcing conjecture.