Doomsday Men: What Peter Thiel Saw at Hastings

On the 18th of August, the British Museum gave Billionaire Peter Thiel early access to view the Bayeux Tapestry a month before it opened to the Public, whilst tens of thousands of enthusiastic patrons were sitting in a nine-hour online queue for tickets.

The ensuing media outrage raised questions about elite privilege, Thiel’s many controversial ventures (including a few off-the-record lectures dubbed ‘The Antichrist’ that were held in Rome earlier this year), and the ethics of a public institution such as the British Museum, subject already to the ire of many activists and academics, doing favors for the founder of a company with its hand already inside the pot of British politics.

Those are fair questions. Yet they are not the most interesting ones. Thiel has spent twenty years arguing that the modern West can no longer found anything; no new countries, no new orders, just the exhausting management of what already exists. Perhaps the Bayeux Tapestry, to Thiel, is the record of the last time it did.

ENGLISH HISTORY BECOMES NORMAN

To see why the Bayeux Tapestry might have piqued the fascination of the billionaire, it helps to be clear about what the tapestry is. It is not, in fact, a testament to the triumph of the English, but rather the Normans. Almost certainly commissioned by Odo of Bayeux, the tapestry through its many panels (nearly 250 feet long) depicts the Norman conquest of England and the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

The tapestry unfolds like a legal brief defending the legitimacy of William the Conqueror’s throne. The dying Edward the Confessor tells his brother-in-law, Harold, to bequeath the throne to William, naming him heir; Harold breaks this promise and crowns himself King of England; an ominous comet appears (this would-be Halley’s Comet!); William crosses the English Channel and battles for the throne at Hastings. The tapestry was likely embroidered and stitched in Canterbury by groups of Englishwomen, which has a rather dark tone of the conquered weaving their own conquest.

Two other interesting facts stand out about the tapestry; one, that its captions are in Latin, and two, that the final panel likely depicting the coronation scene of William the Conqueror is missing. The captions in Latin tells you who this tapestry was for; Anglo-Saxon England wrote its laws and chronicles in Old English, which was rare in Europe at the time. The Norman conquest replaced it with Latin and French as the language of record, in what Simon Jenkins describes as “the moment England’s vernacular government gave way to a continental one”. Noteworthy as well is that Latin, being the ecclesial vernacular, gave further legitimacy to William’s conquest aside from Pope Alexander II, who sent him a ring and Papal standard.

The missing panel very likely depicted the scene of the coronation, sealing the argument of the cloth that the conquest and subsequent succession was legitimate, forever changing the history of the English Isles.

DOOMSDAY

What the tapestry leaves out is William the Conqueror’s subsequent legacy, which is likely the part of the story that drew Thiel in. Within a generation following the conquest of England by the Normans, the English aristocracy was decimated, its land redistributed by the conquerors. Famously, in 1086, twenty years following the conquest, the new King sent commissionaires across the country to conduct a survey of all that he now owned: every manor, every plough, every mill–– and all its past and present owners.

The English named the result the Doomsday Book, where the results yielded harsh judgements on land redistribution, property taxes that couldn’t be appealed, and a general loss of the Anglo-Saxon ‘way-of-life’. To the people, it must have felt nothing short of the Last Judgement, the doom from which there is no escape. It was the first time a king of England could survey the entire realm at once.

William’s story is of an all-seeing executive whose universal surveillance gave him unprecedented control over his realm. One begins to see its appeal to Thiel, founder of Palantir, which now runs the NHS’s data platform and holds Ministry of Defence contracts.

THIEL THE CONQUEROR?

Was 1066 the last “successful” founding of a Western state? Peter Thiel seems to think so, or at least his political theology and subsequent philosophy commits him to something close to it. Thiel, following French philosopher Rene Girad, has a quasi-religious notion of what it means to found a state. It entails an exceptional actor imposing order on an established polity to legitimize it by directing communal violence against a scapegoat.

Girard’s central thesis, which Thiel makes his own, is that Christianity broke this the mechanism of the scapegoat. By narrating the story of the founding murder from the perspective of the suffering Christ, the Gospels make it impossible to blame the innocent sacrificial lamb. An act of founding violence no longer produces order (in the Girardian sense). This is precisely why the modern West can no longer found anything, and it is why Thiel’s political endeavours are a search for a way around the Gospels rather than through them. A sovereign strong enough to impose order on a people who can no longer be persuaded that his violence was God’s will, is one that is no longer re-enacting the myth.

The historical objection to that position is of course immediate; Norman Sicily, Castilian Granada all the way to the United States and Bismarck’s Reich––all states made after Hastings. Further afield, the East India Company performing almost mercenary-like moves to lay grounds for what would become the British Raj has its own parallel founding; the Mughal administration that The Company inherited, to becoming the nominal successor to the emperor in Delhi. Although not entirely within a single generation, the ruling aristocracy of the princely states of South Asia eventually toppled one after the other, with many retaining just their hereditary titles today. The Raj did not end in a founding but in a withdrawal.

But Thiel might respond: the partitions that followed, in India and Pakistan, in Palestine and Israel, and in all the other mandates from the Levant to the Gulf, produced states by subtraction, where its conquerors divided what they could no longer keep. Their borders were drawn not around a new sovereign, but around the absence of an old one.

And so what the modern record shows is not the mimicry of founding (borrowing from Girard), but rather its inversion. If founding means what Thiel’s Girard concludes to––an exceptional actor imposing order on an established polity to legitimize it––then Hastings is not merely an early-stage example, but the last fully realized one.

Which brings us back to the gallery at the British Museum. Thiel has spent a career looking for a place where a founder could still do what William did, and for the public to accept him and his work despite (or even because of) its cost. What he stood in front of on the 18th of August was the record that makes his case; the violence can be made holy––sacralised––with the whole fabric of the country can be changed in mere decades. Thiel, I suspect, clearly sees the lost panel, the one that dramatically depicts the subjection of the Englishmen to his imagined founding conqueror.

*Manousha Dhiwaghar is a historian-in-training at Carleton University, specializing in intellectual history, diplomacy, and political theology. Her research focuses on early Zionist binationalism, the intersection of religion and statecraft, and the evolution of modern diplomatic history. She has conducted archival work in Jerusalem and Oxford, contributed to United Nations-affiliated research, and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a 2024–25 CJPAC Junior Fellow and staff writer for the Carleton Global Review.

https://providencemag.com/2026/09/doomsday-men-what-peter-thiel-saw-at-hastings/