Who was the most powerful, most cunning and most illusive figure or organization in history...

Eleanor of Aquitaine or Charles V

The one's the masses have never heard of. In other words, you question is unanswerable.

They were sneaky world powers that amassed large amounts of power quickly. Not exactly illusive but surprising.

The closest thing to an actual answer you are going to get is probably the hashashin

At a certain level of power you can't really hide it.

Also intelligence networks are like bread and butter to rulers. It is not like game of thrones where everyone is a naive fool except the main characters who have edgy conversations about very basic concepts the normy viewer can understand. There are few figures who openly declared themselves to be dedicated spymasters, everything was kept secret for obvious reasons and there were no intelligence dossiers that could be opened up in 50 years like today. They probably just tossed them in the fireplace to reduce the chances of information escaping to absolute zero. There is this guy though.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Walsingham

If someone like that truly existed, you'd never hear of them anyways, as they controlled everything from the shadows, were never exposed to the light, enjoyed their luxury and died in relative wealth and contentment.
If I had to name someone who gets close to your description I'd maybe say Octavianus Augustus - he cucked the repubulicans, the triumvirate and took all the power for himself.

>show littlefinger
>everyone knows he's a devious cunning mastermind, yet for some reason they still go along with it
>book littlefinger
>everyone thinks he's just a flamboyant beta
Books are still weak in this regard, but this one pissed me off the most.

...

>jet fuel

Cicada 3301 was pretty powerful. They were the ones behind the arab spring.

This and Bismark.

Paul Kagame did some pretty cunning shit back in the 80's and 90's and still is to this day. History will remember him as the African Bismark.

Proofs?

There is a small, loosely organized ring of individuals who don't actually posses an incredible amount of personal wealth or explicit political position. They're the oddball invite at the dinners and galas of titans, and they mingle with the ultra-powerful as easily as though they were born into the life, but none were. In conversation, their rhetoric is seemingly casual but ultimately arresting. They project little outward confidence- even taking on an air of subservience at times- but their words are like viruses in the minds of the elite. A five-minute conversation that a Saudi oil baron can't even remember the next day can raise or lower the price of oil by ten percent. A short exchange with a tech billionaire can accelerate, delay, or cancel product development and release. Less than a hundred words scattered around a D.C. social function can provide Syrian rebels with hundreds of millions of dollars in training and equipment. Coffee with a Filipino politician on a sweltering July morning can result in the deaths of thousands, and put enormous pressure on one corner of the world's drug market.

All of them are perfect or near-perfect psychopaths- utterly inhuman minds. They have no explicit leadership, but they do have certain non-negotiable objectives which they are willing to spend any amount of time and human lives to achieve.

Sounds like a neat book plot. I'd buy it if you wrote it.

More like Père Joseph

That's just Rome, and they aren't elusive.

The Elders of Zion. A group of Jews going back to the Pharisees attempting world domination. Manage to convince everyone their leaked protocols were a forgery.

Augustus Caesar
>
>I'm not a king, I'm just First Citizen. Kings have crowns and make people prostrate themselves. I'm just like, a first-among-equals. You know like how all Romans are equal but some are more equal than others?
>I'm just here to preserve the Republic and save it from itself, to make it like it was in the golden age when men were men and women and youths knew their place.
>Julius Caesar was a self-made man who lived the Roman dream and made himself fabulously wealthy by the sweat of his own brow. You should worship him because that's actually everything that you inspire to be in the world.
>I don't need public lictors, I have my own paid thugs err, I mean the Praetorian Guard! I call them that because it's like they're literally guarding the republic. And by guarding the republic I mean they're guarding it's most important citizen, the hope upon whom all of our republican values rest, of course.
>Appointing bickering senators to administrative posts only encourages restless behavior, so I'll just appoint these equites instead. Oh no, the fact that they're my partisans is totally just a coincidence
>the only permanent government post I really need is High Priest of the State Religion. I'll handle all those extraordinarily difficult and tedious and not-mundane-at-all affairs of calendar regulation and as a tiny, insignificant, forgettable little side project (which you shouldn't focus on too much) I'll control the flow of information throughout the city.
>Ever wonder why "Octo-month" is the tenth month of the year and not the 8th? Or why "sept-month" is the ninth month of the year and not the 7th? Because on the month with the most days of the year everyone still utters my name and remembers how powerful I wasn't

Petyr Baelish

Unfortunately, that book plot is what runs the planet.

What are their non-negotiable objectives?

Are they the new Hapsburgs?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades
/thread

aesthetic borders

Weird high-concept shit pertaining to immortality, the nature of consciousness, and the harvesting of experiences from all of human history for their own hedonistic interest. I'm not too clear on it all.

The relatively recent rise of the private space industry is their doing, because part of their long game is the human colonization of space. Elon Musk is their proudest creation- the slow decline of government funded space exploration after the end of the Apollo program was their doing, in order to create the frustration that would ultimately cultivate a billionaire who was utterly devoted to the cause of making humanity spacefaring.

As far as I can tell, their individual lives don't matter too much to them (death being rendered insignificant upon completion of the above mentioned "high concept shit"), so they're frighteningly patient with their machinations. A popular tactic is to create situations that are seemingly counter to their motivations, which will generate a large number of people aligned with their viewpoints, a handful of which will statistically end up in positions of money and power. They then use these people as tools to shape the world.

Rome wasn't sneaky at all. Armies marching down a road at you screaming "join or get fucked" are not subtle.

Who are they? This is some x tier shit

youtube.com/watch?v=fJEV3dGyp3U

10 (you)s it's "DA JOOS', "ILLUMERNARDY", or "DA LIZARDS"

You're retarded, we're talking about individuals and not states. Rome also preferred a much more overtly militarsitic approach to diplomacy beyond its' borders unlike the Italian city states, the Persians or China

Talleyrand and Kissinger

Hmmmmm

I hope you realize you are asking us to identify someone known for being the most ilusive and mysterious power-figure in history

Asking for this is essentially asking for you to identify the illuminati

tell me more

dude hypnosis lmao

Damascus

Jean Pujol Garcia, hands down, no questions asked.

Based.

Pls tell me you have some proofs or resources explaining more.

Can't believe none of you guys mentioned the Stalin clique. Most of those guys were practically nobodies, but by the late 20's, they controlled a Great Power.

Read my original post. It's a tiny, unnamed, loosely organized group of incredibly manipulative psychopaths.

Even if I posted one of their names, you'd find nothing. Not a single one holds any kind of social media account, and they intentionally avoid having their names make the news. When cameras come out, they disappear like fish before a shark. At high-society events, parties, and weddings where photographers are present, they either dodge the camera or slip the folks a few hundred dollars to exclude them from even being in the background of shots.

All of their written records are in an invented non-Latin script, and most of those are destroyed immediately after they're no longer of use. When they speak to each other about sensitive matters, it's in a language of their own invention as well, which I'm almost certain accompanies the script. An outsider could sit in at one of their rare physical meetings, and glean absolutely nothing from it.

Is this just a copypasta from the new hitman game.......

u wot

Then how comes You know about them? Where'd You First get This idea?

yeah he's pretty much the ultimate incarnation of his kind
nobody has truly come close to what he did

This man right here.
Even Kissinger couldn't understand what he could.

>immortality, the nature of consciousness, and the harvesting of experiences from all of human history for their own hedonistic interest.
that would be me, except I'm a sperg with no social skills

>Too bad my wife cucked me out of all of my rightful heirs

idk about the rest of europe and the usa but they are definetely famous in France at least

I know three. One is a pretty close friend and I met the others through them.

A notable thing about psychopaths is that they like to show off their handiwork- all the better if the one they show isn't in any position to actually do anything about it.

There's no proof Livia was behind their deaths

I don't you understand what a 'psychopath' is.

Yeah, everyone that rivaled her son Tiberius just happened to die in mysterious circumstances. I'm sure it was just a coincidence.

I'm using it to refer to extreme Antisocial Personality Disorder

So what's their endgame?

Becoming God, probably. Refer to

It's treason, then.

Tell them their God is boring.

So how much do You actually know? How did You meet The 'friend' and how much is he willing to talk about?

So how much do You actually know? How did You meet The 'friend' and how much is he willing to talk about?

Tell me more

He's just one of my friends. As in, a person I've known for a while and like to hang out with. He won't talk about what I've said in this thread, because he and the rest of his organization prefer absolute secrecy.

As for the APD/psychopath thing, I suspect from your writing style that you aren't very proficient with the English language, and I'm just not willing to try and overcome that language barrier right now.

I don't even know what their consensus on God is, so I can't see how that'd be productive.

They look like the children of Mark Ruffalo and Robbie Rotten

Why do I see this everywhere lately
Who are these beautiful gentlemen

...

Talleyrand masterminded the Bourbon restoration

That's close. I think they plan to usurp rather than merge though, if there's already a God.

Okay but who is this small ring of individuals

I'd rather not be dismembered and fed to pigs, in the event that you somehow manage to glean useful information from their names.

Where is this from?

I think you know how to use google.

You realise that without any evidence, you're only providing us a quickly-forgotten bit of entertainment, don't you?

Yep, and my lack of evidence to give is entirely by their design.

Just thought you guys would like to know. Whether you believe it or not is immaterial.

They can't even prove their existence

...

this little fella

Can you name a recent event which ''''they'''' have influenced?

>the gullible retard are still replying to that /x/- tier b8

Christ almighty.

And how do they plan to do that?

See

shhh!! the goyim can't know!

crashing this thread

I second Bismark, was always way ahead of everyone

Like I said, the whole geopolitical landscape of human space exploration is pretty much exclusively their doing, as well as Duterte's rise to power and mass suppression of the Phillipine drug trade. Also, the Middle East is kept in turmoil for the purpose of excusing the ludicrous size of the US military, which in turn discourages large-scale destructive conflict.

Exactly, and why would they ever want to?

I have no idea, but getting humanity to the upper areas of the Kardashev scale is involved.

Addiction

What?

Learning the results of one's actions could show them not only what to look for to find out again but where not to look and how to find it.

*To find it again
>not out

See

They sound rather arrogant.

How would they survive the ages? Death finds us all eventually.

I'm rather sceptical of their supposed control of geopolitics aswell. The world is in constant flux, after all.

But please, enlighten me.