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The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (retitled Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the United States) is a controversial book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.The book was first published in 1982 by Jonathan Cape in London, as an unofficial follow-up to three BBC TV documentaries being part of the Chronicle series. A sequel to the book, called The Messianic Legacy,was published in 1987. The original work was reissued in an illustrated hardcover version in 2005. One of the books, according to the authors, which influenced the project was L’Or de Rennes (later re-published as Le Trésor Maudit), a 1967 book by Gérard de Sède, with the collaboration of Pierre Plantard.In this book, the authors put forward a hypothesis that the historical Jesus married Mary Magdalene, had one or more children, and that those children or their descendants emigrated to what is now southern France. Once there, they intermarried with the noble families that would eventually become the Merovingian dynasty, whose special claim to the throne of France is championed today by a secret society called the Priory of Sion.

An international bestseller upon its release, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail spurred interest in a number of ideas related to its central thesis. Response from professional historians and scholars from related fields was universally negative. They argued that the bulk of the claims, ancient mysteries, and conspiracy theories presented as facts are pseudohistorical. Nevertheless, these ideas were considered blasphemous enough for the book to be banned in some Roman Catholic-dominated countries such as the Philippines.

In a review of the book for the The Observer, literary critic Anthony Burgess wrote: "It is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel." Twenty-one years later, the theme of The Holy Blood and Holy Grail would be very successfully fictionalised by Dan Brown in his 2003 conspiracy fiction novel The Da Vinci Code,even using Richard Leigh’s and Michael Baigent’s last names (Baigent's scrambled) for the character Leigh Teabing.After reading Le Tresor Maudit, Henry Lincoln persuaded BBC Two's factual television series of the 1970s, Chronicle, to make a series of documentaries, which became quite popular and generated thousands of responses. Lincoln then joined forces with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh for further research. This led them to the pseudohistorical Dossiers Secrets at the Bibliothèque nationale de France which, though alleging to portray hundreds of years of medieval history, were actually all written by Pierre Plantard and Philippe de Chérisey under the pseudonym of "Philippe Toscan du Plantier". Unaware that the documents had been forged, Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln used them as a major source for their 1982 non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.Comparing themselves to the reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal, the authors maintain that only through speculative "synthesis can one discern the underlying continuity, the unified and coherent fabric, which lies at the core of any historical problem." To do so, one must realize that "it is not sufficient to confine oneself exclusively to facts."