Portugal is a setting where the novel’s historical record and its invented Templar pattern become unusually difficult to separate. Casaubon travels there with Brazilian friends, visits Tomar’s former Templar stronghold, and considers how Portugal’s association with the Knights of Christ fits the alleged Plan of Provins. In the Plan’s chronology, Portugal is the first of six prescribed locations, the point from which a chain of supposed successions and meetings is made to extend across centuries and countries.

Travel and Historical Setting

Casaubon’s visit follows a conference on Lusitanian culture in Coimbra. His Brazilian friends had kept in touch and arranged an invitation, partly because they wanted to see him again. Lia, then in her seventh month of pregnancy, stayed home. After three evenings with his former comrades, Casaubon travelled with them by bus toward Lisbon. The group debated whether to stop at Fatima or Tomar; Casaubon preferred Tomar because it was a Templar castle, and the others were not especially keen on Fatima.

Tomar’s historical associations give the visit its force. Casaubon understands the Portuguese Templars to have withdrawn there after the king and pope spared them trial and ruin by transforming them into the Order of the Knights of Christ. The castle’s fortified approach and cruciform openings make its Crusader associations immediately legible to him. He describes the Knights of Christ as prospering there for centuries, and notes the tradition that Henry the Navigator and Christopher Columbus belonged to the order, which was associated with Portugal’s maritime expansion. The site had been rebuilt and enlarged over time, joining medieval structures with Renaissance and Baroque additions.

Inside the church, Casaubon is moved by its octagonal rotunda, which reproduces the form of the Holy Sepulcher. He also notices that Templar crosses vary according to place and period, unlike the more consistent cross of the Knights of Malta. This uneven iconography is more than an antiquarian detail: it helps explain how easily a search for Templar traces can turn ordinary or locally shaped symbols into apparent evidence. Casaubon observes that Templar-hunters interpret almost any cross found at a site as a possible mark of the order.

Portugal in the Plan of Provins

The supposed Plan assigns Portugal a foundational position. In the message Casaubon considers, six sealed instructions are associated with six places and a sequence of twenty-year intervals repeated six times, producing a span of 120 years. The first group is said to go to the Castle; Casaubon connects this instruction with the Knights of Christ establishing themselves at Tomar in 1357, thirteen years after the message’s stated date of 1344. That gap becomes a link in the interpretation rather than a reason to question it.

Portugal also occupies the first place in Diotallevi’s diagram of the proposed succession. The locations are arranged as Portugal, England, France, Germany, Bulgaria, and Jerusalem, with dates running from 1344 through 1944 at 120-year intervals. In the accompanying theory, six grand masters succeed one another in each group during each interval. The sixth master at Tomar is supposed to meet the sixth English master in 1464; the sequence then posits a meeting between English and French masters in 1584. Portugal thus serves as the starting point from which a transnational history of handoffs, appointments, and possible failures is constructed.

The scheme depends on treating the message’s words as a timetable and its place-names as coordinates. Tomar’s known history appears to confirm the first station, and that apparent confirmation encourages the researchers to project the same structure forward. The account’s internal coherence is therefore also its danger: a genuine historical refuge and a recorded date become supports for a much larger claim that the evidence does not independently establish.

From Historical Clue to Interpretive Chain

Casaubon’s reading of Portugal belongs to a broader habit of connecting materials once suspicion has prepared him to see symbols everywhere. The castle’s history, the message’s wording, and the proposed sequence of places are not treated as separate kinds of evidence. Instead, each is made to validate the others: Tomar fits the Castle, the Castle fits the first station, and the remaining stations invite further searches for corresponding histories.

The Rosicrucian manifestoes seem to deepen this pattern. Casaubon reads their references to the Plan, a treasure hidden for 120 years, a historical transformation, a final appointment, and a great work as signs that the scheme had once been transmitted through successive groups. Their account of C. R. travelling to Spain or Portugal and showing the learned there indications of future centuries prompts him to wonder whether the message’s transmission had stopped. The manifestoes also refer to an English line and a French line meeting in 1584, which appears to match the sequence already assembled around Portugal.

Portugal’s narrative significance lies in this double status. It is a concrete place, with a castle, a church, and a documented institutional history; it is also the first term in a pattern whose later links are inferred through analogy. The visit does not simply disclose a hidden history. It shows how the researchers’ search turns historical complexity into a structure that seems to explain itself, as each discovery supplies the next occasion for connection.