The Prieur\xe9 de Sion, translated from French as Priory of Sion, is a name given to multiple groups, both real and fictitious. The most controversial is a fringe fraternal organisation, founded and dissolved in France in 1956 by Pierre Plantard. In the 1960s, Plantard created a fictitious history for that organisation, describing it as a secret society founded by Godfrey of Bouillon on Mount Zion in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, conflating it with a genuine historical monastic order, the Abbey of Our Lady of Mount Zion. In Plantard's version, the priory is devoted to installing a secret bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty on the thrones of France and the rest of Europe.[2] This myth was expanded upon and popularised by the 1982 pseudohistorical book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail[1] and later claimed as factual in the preface of the 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code.[3]