Crusades

The Crusades, the period of conflict in which the Templars encountered the Assassins, become in the novel the imagined birthplace of the Plan: a secret tradition supposedly transmitted between rival religious orders and later woven into a conspiracy spanning centuries. The account is deliberately unstable. It moves between historical sources and the protagonists’ increasingly confident inventions, while the book’s treatment of anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives exposes how falsehoods are assembled from copied texts, political motives, and selective interpretation.

Templars and Assassins

Casaubon traces accounts of the Templars from early sources, including Gerard of Strasbourg and Joinville, and describes their relation to the Assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain as alternating between conflict and mysterious alliance. In the group’s reconstruction, hostility on the battlefield does not rule out secret cooperation: the two orders supposedly exchanged concessions, recognized one another’s resolve, and shared occult knowledge. This juxtaposition supplies the Plan with a founding scene in which enemies can become partners behind the visible course of war.

The account gives the Assassins’ tradition its own layered background. It connects their religious world to the Shiite understanding of the Imam as the continuing embodiment of revelation, then imagines esoteric influences from across the Mediterranean entering that tradition. The narrative’s accumulation of doctrines and historical names conveys both the reach of Casaubon’s research and its vulnerability to excess: an unwieldy record becomes material that the three men can reorganize into a pattern.

The imagined origin of the Plan

In the protagonists’ reconstruction, the Templars learn from the men of Alamut about subterranean currents and establish the secret plot of the Thirty-six Invisibles at Provins. The supposed chain then extends far beyond the Crusades: Christian Rosencreutz’s journey east, Guillaume Postel’s Oriental interests, Renaissance engagements with Egyptian knowledge, and Cagliostro’s rituals are all made to look like later expressions of the same inheritance. The Crusades matter not simply as military history but as the imagined hinge that allows scattered traditions to be presented as one continuous secret.

The story also recasts the Templars’ accusations of heresy. Practices cited by Philip IV’s inquisitors are interpreted by the conspiratorial account not as proof of an independent Templar doctrine, but as borrowings from rites supposedly encountered in the East. That explanation is part of the Plan’s logic, not an independently established historical conclusion: once contact with the Assassins is treated as a source of hidden knowledge, even hostile accusations can be absorbed as clues to transmission.

Conspiracy as a rewriting of history

The Crusades’ place in the Plan is illuminated by the novel’s account of later conspiracy texts. Diotallevi presents the Protocols as twenty-four declarations attributed to the Elders of Zion, whose contradictory prescriptions encompass suppressing press freedom, promoting liberal ideas, manipulating social unrest, exploiting gold, fomenting war, and engineering political control. The contradictions do not interrupt the conspiratorial reading; they are made to seem like evidence of an all-purpose strategy. The text’s anti-Semitic claims turn a fabricated image of Jewish power into a supposed explanation for social and political disorder.

The narrative then traces how such material is copied and redirected. When the Jesuits encounter a work attributed to them, they exploit Simonini’s letter to blame the Jews; the later discovery that the Protocols drew heavily on Maurice Joly’s pamphlet against Napoleon III does not end the conspiracy-making. Instead, Nesta Webster’s reasoning absorbs the plagiarism into a still larger Plan, now attributed to the Templars. Another account describes Rachkovsky replacing Witte with the Jews in a text derived from Joly, using the alteration to produce a forged political document. These episodes show how a supposed secret history can be manufactured by repeatedly changing the alleged author and target while retaining fragments of earlier texts.

The Plan’s moral distortion

The same conspiratorial method reaches its most destructive expression when the group folds the Holocaust into the Plan. Belbo proposes that the Nazis’ bureaucratic procedures were supposedly a search for a hidden clue among their victims, and connects that invented motive to a theory of telluric currents and a hollow Earth. This interpretation is not a historical explanation of the genocide: it is a grotesque instance of the Plan’s power to convert atrocity into confirmation of its own fantasies.

That episode sharpens the contrast between historical suffering and the men’s game of reconstruction. Earlier, the Crusades could be treated as distant material for an elaborate narrative of secret alliances; when the same method is applied to the murder of Jews, its moral cost becomes impossible to ignore. Across both periods, the Plan claims to make unrelated events intelligible by placing them inside a hidden design. The novel shows instead how that promise can erase the reality of those events and recycle the falsehoods through which people are blamed and persecuted.