Tomar Castle

Tomar Castle is the Portuguese stronghold where the surviving Templars are said to have found refuge and where Casaubon comes to believe that the Plan began. Its fortified road, hybrid architecture, rose-marked crypt, and history as the home of the Order of Christ give him concrete material for his increasingly elaborate chain of correspondences. Later, the castle reappears in his imagined triumph as the setting for its sudden reversal: the secret master finds himself surrounded by the very Templars whose power he had claimed to command.

History and Setting

Casaubon’s visit grows out of a conference on Lusitanian culture in Coimbra, where he has been invited by Brazilian friends. Returning by bus to Lisbon, the group debates whether to stop at Fatima or Tomar. Casaubon argues for Tomar because he cannot pass up a Templar castle; the others are fortunately less enthusiastic about Fatima. The choice turns a social excursion into the occasion for one of his most consequential acts of historical interpretation.

He imagines Tomar as an ideal Templar castle. A fortified road climbs beside its outer bastions, whose openings are cut in the shape of crosses, and the approach immediately gives him what he calls Crusader air. The Portuguese Templars had withdrawn there after the king and pope spared them trial and ruin by transforming their order into the Order of Christ. The Order prospered at Tomar for centuries and devoted itself to maritime expansion, helping make Portugal’s fortune. Its long occupation also left a visible record of change: medieval structures were joined by Renaissance and Baroque wings.

The castle’s religious architecture carries that accumulated history into the visit. Casaubon is moved by the Templars’ church, whose octagonal rotunda reproduces the form of the Holy Sepulcher. The crosses associated with the Templars vary across periods and local traditions, unlike the comparatively stable cross of the Knights of Malta. That historical variability has a consequence for the modern search for traces: Templar hunters can mistake almost any cross they find for evidence of the knights.

Architecture and Signs

The guide shows Casaubon a Manueline window, an intricate collage of marine and submarine motifs: seaweed, shells, anchors, capstans, and chains. The imagery celebrates the Order of Christ’s achievements at sea. Two towers frame the window and carry carvings of the insignia of the Garter. When the guide cannot explain the presence of an English order’s emblem in a Portuguese fortified monastery, Casaubon supplies a connection of his own; elsewhere, the guide points out the insignia of the Golden Fleece. Casaubon links the Garter to the Fleece, the Fleece to the Argonauts, the Argonauts to the Grail, and the Grail to the Templars. The sequence is not established by the guide’s account; it is assembled by Casaubon from the signs before him and his memories of Colonel Ardenti’s story and the Diabolicals’ manuscripts.

A crypt deepens the impression that the building conceals a deliberate initiatory design. After seven steps, a bare stone floor leads to the apse, where an altar—or, in Casaubon’s speculation, the grand master’s chair—might have stood. The way in passes beneath seven rose-shaped keystones, each larger than the last, with the final one above a well. To Casaubon, the conjunction of Cross and Rose in a Templar monastery appears to anticipate the Rosicrucian manifestos. The guide says that students of occult sciences make pilgrimages to the site and that the room is reputed to have been an initiation chamber. A reputation and a striking arrangement of architectural details become, for Casaubon, mutually reinforcing clues.

The castle also contains evidence of less mysterious contact. In an unrestored room cluttered with dusty furniture and large cardboard boxes, Casaubon finds fragments of volumes in Hebrew, apparently from the seventeenth century. The guide explains that the knights had friendly relations with Tomar’s Jewish community and shows him a small garden laid out as an elegant French maze by the eighteenth-century Jewish architect Samuel Schwarz. Rather than interrupting his search for secret continuity, the discovery supplies another historical connection within the same place.

Tomar as the Beginning of the Plan

At Tomar, Casaubon rereads the Provins message through the castle’s history. Its references to a first meeting at a castle and to a second appointment in Jerusalem seem to him to identify Tomar as the Castle of the Ordonation in Ingolf’s document. He dismisses the more romantic possibilities of Monsalvat and Avalon: the Templars of Provins, he reasons, would have chosen a real stronghold where fellow members could direct commanderies, not a castle out of Arthurian literature. Tomar appears to fit because surviving members of the order there enjoyed freedom and guarantees, and could supposedly contact agents of the second group.

The message Casaubon and Belbo reread describes six sealed communications, six places, and intervals of twenty years adding up to 120 years. It names the Castle as the first location. Casaubon pairs that instruction with the date of the Templars’ establishment at Tomar, 1357, and takes the correspondence as support for his identification. What had once been a document that he could treat lightly now seems to him to encode an organized, long-term operation.

He leaves Tomar and Portugal convinced that the Templars, after becoming a secret order, had developed a Plan intended to last six centuries and conclude in their own century. In this new interpretation they are not figurative or careless when they name a castle: they mean an actual castle, and the Plan begins at Tomar. Casaubon also reconsiders Colonel Ardenti’s proposed route through places such as Stonehenge, Avalon, and Agarttha, concluding that the message must be studied again. The reversal is revealing: he recognizes that the task is not to discover the Templars’ secret but to construct it, even as his own chain of connections makes the constructed Plan feel increasingly real.

Later Return and Narrative Significance

Tomar returns in Casaubon’s imagined scene months later, now transformed from a visited monument into the center of a fantasy of mastery. In the deepest crypt, he pictures himself as lord of the six sacred places and successor to the Thirty-six Invisibles, possessing the secret of subterranean currents and the authority of the Unknown Superiors. He expects to win Cecilia, whom he imagines as an androgyne with icy eyes, and to recover her after centuries of separation. The grandiose claims turn the castle into a private theater in which historical speculation, erotic fantasy, and command over hidden forces converge.

The scene’s architecture then reverses its promise. The chapel is hewn from rock, and its altar stands beneath a canvas depicting the torments of the damned. When the painting is raised, it reveals another chapel behind it, an apparent copy with Cecilia kneeling at the altar and the real Giuseppe Balsamo beside her, his scar displayed in mockery. Casaubon recognizes him as the man he had thought imprisoned in the Fortress of San Leo. The nested chapels do not confirm Casaubon’s command of a hidden world; they expose his position inside a scene whose layers he cannot control.

The fantasy culminates in the appearance of the Templars of Provins. Hooded monks reveal armor beneath their habits and flaming crosses on white cloaks; among them is Luciano, whom Casaubon had believed dead and who has joined his enemies for revenge. Tomar thus anchors two opposite versions of the same story: first, Casaubon’s confident identification of a real castle as the Plan’s point of departure; later, the imagined stronghold where his claim to mastery is confronted by the figures his conspiracy has assembled. The building’s genuine historical layers furnish the signs, but their transformation into a complete secret history belongs to Casaubon’s interpretation.