The Real Inspiration For The Da Vinci Code Wasn't Jesus – It Was A Notorious Hoax From The 1950s

It wouldn't be a good hoax if it didn't involve Nostradamus. The 16th-century doctor is famous for his predictions of the future, some of which came true and some of which did not. One of Nostradamus's prophecies spoke of a "great monarch... ravishing the treasure in front of the temples." 

The riddles in Nostradamus's prophecies made them open to interpretation, but also vulnerable to hoaxes. Pierre Plantard, a French veteran of World War II, decided that he was the prophesied great monarch, and created fake manuscripts to show he was a direct descendant of the Merovingian kings and Jesus himself. But instead of fulfilling the prophecy, Plantard simply created an elaborate hoax.

In The Da Vinci Code, Leonardo da Vinci was a secret grand master of the Priory of Sion, and hid messages about the secret society in his paintings. Brown took that idea directly from Plantard, who forged a list of the Priory of Sion's grand masters. The list included Nicolas Flamel, Robert Fludd, Botticelli, Isaac Newton, and Leonardo da Vinci, among many others.

Plantard and his co-conspirator, Philippe de Chérisey, created multiple fake manuscripts which contained the "secrets" of the invented Priory of Sion. These documents were hidden in the French National Library, where other scholars discovered them and believed they were genuine. The forged list of grand masters was published in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, where Brown read it and created his own version of the Da Vinci story.

Plantard wove another mystery into his hoax: the treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau, the castle in a small French village. In the 1890s, the Catholic priest Bérenger Saunière suddenly became fabulously wealthy, with no explanation for his riches. His salary of 900 francs a year certainly didn't account for his spending of 660,000 francs. Rumors swirled for decades that Saunière had discovered a hidden treasure - or a hidden secret that made him rich. 

Plantard heard the story had asked a friend of his to create forged documents that the priest supposedly discovered in the chateau. He pointed friends to the documents, encouraging them to write about the mystery. And suddenly the "Priory of Sion" was responsible for the priest's wealth: they must have paid him off to keep a centuries-old secret.

However, Saunière likely got rich by "trafficking in masses," a practice that involved charging a stipend to celebrate hundreds or thousands of masses. 

In The Da Vinci Code, hero Robert Langdon sees a hidden message in Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. The figure to the right of Jesus is not an apostle at all - it's his secret wife Mary Magdalene, and the position of the bodies even spells out the letter "M" for marriage. Today, many of Leonardo's most famous works are at the Louvre in Paris, which even provides a special "Da Vinci Code" route through the museum.

But the idea of hidden messages in paintings is nothing new. In fact, Brown might have also borrowed that idea from hoax master Plantard. In this case, the painting was by 17th-century artist Nicholas Poussin, titled "Et in Arcadia Ego." Plantard claimed the phrase, memorialized on a tomb surrounded by shepherds, did not mean "Even in Arcadia, there I am," a reference to death, but instead stood for the mysterious and hidden Priory of Sion.

Later conspiracy theorists claimed the phrase was an anagram for "I! Tego arcana dei!" meaning "Go Away! I hold the secrets of God."

Pierre Plantard, along with two conspirators, wrote multiple forged documents and hid them away in the French National Library. The records included a fake list of the grand masters of the Priory of Sion, along with other information about the secret society, contained in multiple documents. They were called Les Dossiers Secrets d'Henri Lobineau ("the secret records of Henri Lobineau"), Genealogie des rois merovingiens ("a genealogy of the Merovingian kings"), and Les descendants Merovingians ("the Merovingian descendants")

These fake reports, created in the 1960s, manufactured a historical record for the Priory of Sion, which did not exist before 1954. By smuggling the documents into the French National Library, and then encouraging his friends to go find the forgeries, Plantard's hoax took off. Brown even referenced the forgeries on the first page of The Da Vinci Code, when he claimed: "In 1975 Paris's Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci." Except by then, Plantard had admitted the documents were all fake.

The Merovingian dynasty weas key to Plantard's hoax and The Da Vinci Code. Brown claimed that the children of Mary Magdalene and Jesus went on to become French royalty, establishing the first royal Frankish dynasty in the fifth century. The dastardly Vatican murdered seventh-century Merovingian Dagobert II to eradicate the bloodline, according to Brown's book.

Plantard is actually the one who resurrected Dagobert from obscurity in his forged genealogy of Merovingian kings, claiming that Dagobert had a secret treasure - he was the last Merovingian king to carry the holy bloodline. However, Dagobert's murder didn't prevent his blood from continuing through his sibling, and as chance would have it, Plantard claimed there was a 20th-century descendant of the royal bloodline: Pierre Plantard himself.