Balkans

The Balkans are both a geographic corridor and a fabricated hinge in the Plan that Casaubon and his colleagues assemble. In their account, Paulician communities connect the Crusaders’ eastern campaigns to a hidden route toward Jerusalem; later, the same supposed tradition is used to explain the Protocols. The region’s changing role shows how the Plan absorbs historical fragments and turns them into evidence for a secret continuity that the fragments cannot establish.

The Balkans as a route to Jerusalem

Casaubon’s reconstruction begins with the Crusaders’ encounters with Paulicians near Antioch, where the heretics are said to have fought alongside the Arabs, and at Constantinople, where the Paulician community of Philippopolis allegedly tried to deliver the city to the Bulgarian tsar Yoannitsa. From these episodes he proposes a reversal of the familiar Templar-Cathar story: rather than the Templars taking their inspiration from the Cathars, the Templars supposedly formed mysterious connections with Paulician communities and other religious groups during the Crusades. In this account, the route of the alleged Provins message must pass through the Balkans. The route becomes more specific when Casaubon interprets the message’s instruction to go to the stone as pointing to Jerusalem’s Mosque of Omar, where he imagines a surviving, disguised Templar group—or a cabalistic group associated with the Portuguese—waiting. Germany-to-Jerusalem travel through the Balkans then supplies the missing link: the fifth group, identified with the Paulicians, is placed along the way. The map of historical encounters is made to look like a logistical plan, and its apparent economy persuades Belbo that the reconstruction is convincing.

A broken link and an invented succession

The proposed chain does not remain intact. Casaubon suggests that the Paulicians’ natural successors were the Bulgarian Bogomils, but adds that the Templars of Provins could not have anticipated Bulgaria’s later conquest by the Turks and its centuries under Turkish rule. Belbo consequently treats the connection between Germany and Bulgaria as the point where the Plan was interrupted. The gap is not evidence of a functioning network; within the group’s reconstruction, it becomes an explanation for why the supposed network failed to continue. The Balkans thus serve as more than a setting for a medieval encounter. They provide a bridge that the plot needs, while political change supplies a reason the bridge supposedly ceased to work. The distinction between historical event and invented linkage is repeatedly blurred: the narrative borrows named communities, places, and conflicts, then gives them a role in a hidden system for which the story offers no independent proof.

From Paulicians to the Protocols

Much later in the reconstructed chronology, the Paulicians are assigned a role in the production and circulation of the Protocols. Belbo imagines that a Jerusalemite group split into three branches: one linked to neo-Templar circles, another to a Baconian line of scientists and bankers, and a third established in Russia. In this account, the Russian branch is not the Jewish population but the Paulicians, cast as reactionary mystics aligned with landowners and influential at court. Belbo then claims that they sought to discredit Jews in order to damage their supposed rivals abroad. This fabricated explanation draws on actual layers of polemic and textual borrowing described in the novel. The Protocols are presented as a set of twenty-four declarations whose contradictory prescriptions range from suppressing press freedom to encouraging social disorder, while alleging a Jewish project for world power. The narrative traces the text’s supposed ancestry through Maurice Joly’s dialogue, the reuse of material in Sue’s fictionalized Plan, and later anti-Semitic reinterpretations. Rather than confirming Belbo’s story, this chain shows how conspiracy narratives can be copied, altered, and repurposed against new targets.

Geography turned into conspiracy

The Plan’s Balkan connection belongs to a larger method: fragments that can be connected are treated as proof that they must be connected. The same method turns the history of the Protocols into a story of rival secret branches, assigning motives and affiliations to groups on the basis of the pattern the conspirators have already devised. The Balkans help make that pattern feel geographically plausible, but the plausibility is produced by the interpretation itself. The novel’s treatment of this invented continuity becomes especially grave when the Plan is extended to the Nazi genocide of Jews. Belbo claims that the persecution’s bureaucratic procedures must have served a hidden search for a message carried by a representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles, and folds that claim into a fantasy of locating telluric currents beneath the earth. This is presented as the Plan’s paranoid explanation, not as an account of historical reality. Read alongside the earlier Balkan link, it reveals the danger of the group’s method: fabricated connections do not remain harmless puzzles when they turn persecution into supposed evidence for an imagined secret.