Gone Medieval - Assassins and Templars

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

The heart of the Assassin’s Creed franchise is the deadly rivalry between the brotherhoods of Assassins and Templars. These were real groups in history, whose power and influence in their lifetimes matched the longevity of their reputations. But how much of what we know of the two organisations is myth, and what is reality?To help separate fact from fiction, Matt Lewis is joined by Dr Steve Tibble, author of Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood.Echoes of History is a Ubisoft podcast, brought to you by History Hit. Listen to it here.Hosted by: Matt LewisEdited by: Michael McDaidProduced by: Robin McConnellSenior Producer: Anne-Marie LuffProduction Manager: Beth DonaldsonExecutive Producers: Etienne Bouvier, Julien Fabre, Steve Lanham, Jen BennettMusic by Elitsa AlexandrovaTell us your favourite Assassin's Creed game or podcast episode at [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. We've got a Christmas treat for you, and I'm taking a sneaky opportunity to plug the other podcast I host for History Hit, Echoes of History. It's actually fitting to be sneaking this in because the episode you're about to hear is all about the Templars and the assassins and the interplay between two of the most mythologised groups of the medieval period. The episode is a great chat that I had with my friend and friend of gone medieval, Steve Tibble. His book, Assassins and Templars, A Battle in Myth and Blood,

is an absolutely fascinating forensic examination of both groups, the similarities they shared, the differences that separated them, and the interactions between them. It's a great book if you want a good read over the Christmas break or at any other time. Echoes of History is a podcast History Hit produces in partnership with Ubisoft. It looks at the real history behind the Assassin's Creed video games.

So whether you want some general history from ancient Egypt to Victorian London via Greece, the Vikings and Renaissance Italy, or you want to supplement the experience of the games with some more background, then Echoes of History has you covered. Find it and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and I hope I'll see you over there

amongst the Echoes of History. Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and the happiest of New Year's. Here's some blood, murder, intrigue and high politics to get you through Christmas dinner. Welcome to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. We're currently in the Third Crusade, the setting for the first Assassin's Creed game, in which players step into the shoes of master assassin Al-Tayr Ibn Lahad as he fights the Templars in the Holy Land.

In this sequence of episodes, we'll be looking into the core aspects of this fascinating period. We'll immerse ourselves in the siege of Aker and the technology of Crusader castles. We'll examine the political context of the time by learning about the remarkable queens of Jerusalem. We'll uncover the secretive actions of the real Assassins and Knights Templar during the Crusades. And at the end of this sequence of episodes, we'll interview one of the people behind the Assassin's Creed to shed light on how Ubisoft turned history into a video game. Today, we're looking at the truth behind the mythology at the heart of Assassin's Creed. Were the infamous Templars and notorious assassins really bitter enemies?

And what were they up to during the Third Crusade? Your lips are as dry as the hot air around you. The desperate licks of your tongue can't moisten them enough to stop the chapping. Despite the Mediterranean breeze that blows over the battlements of acre, you feel like a blanched bone in the desert. The armour doesn't help. If you only had to wear the linen surcoat with its distinctive red cross on your chest, venturing into the summer heat of the Holy Land might not be so bad. But underneath the white tunic, your chainmail Hobark puts weight onto the quilted gambeson underneath. And the steel helmet, replete with itchy

noseguard and chain mail avontail, sits atop your hood in such a way as to see a seal your body like a blacksmith's furnace. It feels like every bead of sweat is trapped. You think the moisture from your paws is not cooling you, but boiling you alive. Standing under the stark midday sun, if you'd known it would be this arid, you wouldn't have accepted the mission. That being said, you're grateful that the rules of the Templar order forbid long hair. Shortlocks are more practical when wearing helmets, but they also trap less heat. That said, all the other Templar rules are the reason you feel like a frog in the part. You shake your head to clear your mind like a swimmer emerging from the water. You must stay

vigilant. There are enemies everywhere, both without and within the city walls. A commotion in the street below draws your attention. You look down from the rampart and see the crowd in the street hurrying to make way. A group of nights all bearing the Red Cross on their chest rides through. At their centre is a man of very noble bearing. The insignia on his tunic reveals him to be Richard the Lionheart. This is what you've been waiting for. You've heard that Richard is in danger. There is a killer in his midst. Your mission is to eliminate the traitor. You know the traitor's name, but in a crowd of uniformed Templars, he blends in too well. You must do the same, subtly a

Richard expose the killer and deal with him. You call down to the knights as they pass by. They halt and greet you as fellow Templars should. You descend to them much less gracefully than you would have liked to thanks to this armour and address Richard. You tell him that Robert de Sabley, the grand master of the Templars, must be executed for treachery. Richard is bemused by this announcement.

Another knight removes his helmet and steps forward. It is Robert. and he does not hide his outrage. He challenges you to a duel. You accept. As Robert draws his sword, you prepare to fight. Weielding weapons is cumbersome in this European armour, and the hidden blade on your wrist is obstructed too.

For the sake of infiltration, you've sacrificed mobility and put yourself at a disadvantage in combat. But then, the life of an assassin is never easy. To help me separate fact from fiction, I'm joined by Dr Steve Tibble, author of Assassins and Templars, A Battle in Myth and Blood. Welcome to Echoes of History, Steve. It's great to have you with us. Well, thank you, Matt. Lovely to see you again. I can't wait to dive into this one. I've thoroughly enjoyed the book. It's brilliant.

Everyone should read it if you want to know about assassins and Templars, which is exactly where we're at. We really want to know about assassins and Templars. So you are the right man in the right place at the right time. The very first Assassin's Creed game is set during the Third Crusade in the Holy Land. and introduces us to the conflict that is central to the games between the assassins and the Templars. This is probably a simple yes or no question. In 1191, in the Third Crusade, are there assassins and templars? Yes, there are.

They both exist. They love and hate and interact. Yeah, there's a surprising amount of historical synchronicity in the game. I mean, I wrote the book before I really realized what I was writing. I was writing it because they're so fun. You know, I was writing a book about criminals, which surfaced some of the murders of the assassins. I'd written a book about the Templars, so I knew all the material, and then I'd just put them together. And what, but what I didn't realize was just how it was going to turn up, which is basically the backstory for Assassin's Creed, you know, the original version, which is, in fact, what it's strangely, what has turned out to be.

Fortuitously for us, because we get to pick our way through it with you now, while we're still on kind of broad strokes, most people, probably think about Templars as Christian European knights in shining armour with the Red Cross emblazoned on their chest. And most people probably think of assassins being depicted as kind of ninjas really, you know, stealthy sneak attack murderers. Are those broad strokes vaguely true, or is that being way too oversimplistic? Well, the funny thing is there is true, Thimbo. Actually, it's, you know, you don't, it's not often you get a caricature that's completely untrue. I would say they're both caricatures. So the Templars were all on a good day or a bad day, depending on how you look at it.

They were all of the things that you've mentioned. They were ferocious warriors. They were elite. They were in the Holy Land to defend the Christendom, the eastern frontiers. But equally, there was another much bigger side to them, really. Most Templar armies probably had most of their personnel taken from the Arab communities or Armenian communities or Syrian. And these are not, you know, and these will primarily be Christians, Christian Arabs who were the majority of the population in the Holy Land then. So it's a caricature to portray them as these kind of white European conquerors.

And similarly, a lot of the guys who stayed in Europe rather than going to the Middle East were lawyers, investment bankers, you know, diplomats. So they were doing all the super high-powered professional services things as well as being killers. And, you know, they were great at both. and I think that's where they're enduring legacy is. Very similar with the assassins, because they were these ninjasque kind of characters who you really didn't want to meet on a dark night. I mean, you know, if you bump into a couple of them,

it was very bad news. But on the other hand, they weren't drug-crazed knock cases, just killing for the fun of it. There's a wonderful fragment of a letter from Sinan, the old man of the mountain, who was the guy who was in charge, during the Third Crusade, where he wrote,

we are oppressed, not oppressors. And it's such a weird thing to see. You know, it's basically, it's almost whiny. He's almost going, he's saying, well, we're the victims here, lads. But the thing is, it's actually true. They were an religious minority that were being oppressed. They were subject to lots of massacres from their Sunni neighbors.

They were an offshoot of Shiism. So there is, yeah, I think we both of them, There's a large element of truth in the sense of from a PR perspective, that would be the headline of the press release. You know, Templars, elite killers, assassins, ninjasjasins, ninjasias, don't get on the wrong side of us. So the press release headlines broadly have something of accuracy. But when you look down into it, it's very different, much more complex. Yeah, important to get beyond the clickbait headlines. Yeah.

Also, in kind of broad terms, again, talking about both groups, the Templars and the assassins, in the game both have a very kind of strict firm set of rules that they operate by, hence the assassins creed, which drives their actions. Is there something almost cultish about both the Templars and the assassins that they both share this kind of drive, this kind of tight set of rules that they operate by? Yes, very much so. Yeah, and that is part of their mystique. And it's one of the reasons why they're so looming so large in modern mysteries and conspiracies and so on.

The assassins were of much of their history, particularly nowadays, quite a conservative, devout group of Muslims on the Shiite side of Islam. But at the time, they were also quite wacky. They were happy to have talk about other sects. There was a point in the 1160s where they underwent something called the resurrection, where they had to have. actually decided that they weren't going to adhere to Sharia law anymore. So they started eating pork, they started pulling down mosques, where if you refuse to do that, you'd be killed. So they're quite a wacky bunch and they were in quite deep conversation with the Crusaders, which may or may not have been about involving even a conversion to some form of Christianity. I think there's

an element of wishful thinking from the Crusaders part, but they were very, very open-minded. They were into a lot of platonic, platonistic concepts at a time when people on both sides, Christian and Muslim, tended to be quite buttoned down and increasingly kind of strict in adherence. The assassins were the kind of intellectually wacky arm of Islam, which is one reason why they were so popular with their Sunni enemies who, you know, kill them whenever they could on many occasions. And it's the same with the Templars. You know, they're, on the one hand, they're the ultra-sensible guys, you know, professional services, you know, good lawyers if you're, if you're doing a transaction. Nice people to keep the crown jewels with, you know, they're not

very professional. But on the other hand, they have this cult of martyrdom, and it's the only way that they can really express their devotion to Christianity is by looking at this kind of all Vilean view of the world, whereas, you know, you pursue love through death, you pursue peace through war, and so on. And so you find the Templars are actually quite an extreme end of Christianity as well. They, you know, whereas most Christians would focus on love, salvation, resurrection, you know, those tolerances, well, in theory, anyway, those kind of issues, they're much more kind of positive things. Whereas for the Templars, when you look at Templar churches and temple of worship, it's much more about death. You know, you go in a

temple church, and there's a lot of crucifixes there. It's about the death of Christ and the sacrifice he made to protect his people, whereas, you know, the normal Christian church would look at Easter and bunnies and, you know, all the good things like that. The Templars did have a bit of a death cult, and that's one of the reasons why the assassins and the Templars both loathed, but understood each other so well because they were both running this kind of death cult with a fabulous PR machine that made people worry about them because they were both tiny, you know, tiny numbers of tempers put the fear of God into people, tiny numbers of assassins, especially the Fideas, their kind of hit squads. We're talking very small numbers of guys here, but they're feared across the world

way out of proportion to anything that they can really do. And they do that through through operating this great PR machine founded on a death cult. It is fabulous. You can see when they reverberate. Their classic, James Bond, you know, baddies on one level. I was struck reading the book by how much both parties seem to have this sense of they were very willing to die. They didn't necessarily want to die.

And I think one of the things that comes out is probably people think assassins and they think, you know, Kamikaze missions, willing to, you know, almost keen to die on a mission. and Templars fighting battles desperately trying to survive and win, it's almost the opposite way around to some extent, isn't it? Because the Templars believe that they will do their best service if they get killed in a battle, almost like that old Viking thing of going to Valhalla. And the assassins, you know, you're very careful to point out, the assassins very often had escape plans, ways to get away

because they didn't necessarily want to die. They're willing to, but don't want to. So it's almost like the reverse of what people might think the two mindsets were. Yeah, you're absolutely right. That is an irony. I think in reality they were probably fairly close to each other, but you're absolutely right. The key words you used were at one point you said keen and at the other point you said willing. And I think it is very much that both passes are willing to die. They are committed to the cause. They're prepared to fight, be brave, do their duty. There is a kind of a warrior cult thing there. But they're not keen on it. And particularly for For a Christian and a devout Catholic, like all the Templars were suicide, is anathema. So there's a very fine boundary they have to watch out for. They have to try and emulate Christ in terms of sacrifice for their communities, and an assassin would say very much the same.

You know, they're prepared to make personal sacrifice to protect their communities, but they're not looking for it. You know, a death is a corollary of their chosen profession. It's not something that they're eager for. And it does lead on to this whole thing about drugs and, you know, it's an assassin called an assassin because of hashish and so on. And it's, to me, we can talk about it more later if you want, but it's sort of, it's a bit of an insult and it's a deliberate insult by their enemies. Because if you're an assassin with a very carefully crafted hit in mind, you know, these,

these are brave men attacking people who've got massive security networks around them. They have to be totally on the ball. The last thing you want is to be, you know, have some kind of narcotic searching through the body. You know, so you sit down and think, oh, it'd be great to have a marspar or whatever. You actually really want to get in there and do the job, and it's a very difficult job. I call it the idea of getting munchies halfway through a big, well-organized hit. And it's striking, I guess, just on a pragmatic level, these are both, as you said, very small groups. You can't have that sense that we're all going to go out and get killed because then the orders,

whichever order we're talking about ceases to exist. You know, the Fides can't just recklessly throw away their lives because they're so small in number and so highly trained. And the same is pretty true of the Templars too. So in order to preserve what they're trying to achieve, they can't have that kind of wanton disregard for their own lives. Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, you know, the Templars surged into Ascalon, was a very important city that the Crusaders were after, and they managed to break in, but then their comrades failed to follow. And they were wiped down and it almost certainly decimated the order

in the Middle East and they lost 53 men. You know, around 50 men and you think, wow, that's not arched, that's kind of like a slest than a company in modern talents. And the same with the assassins, when they go in mob-handed, you're talking about

13 people. I think 13 was the biggest I've seen fielded it. That was against Saladin. That was somebody they really, really wanted to take out. But normally, the normal assassin squad is three or four. And they try and get away because, as you quite rightly pointed out, you know, there is a very finite number of Fideus, the, you know, the assassin killers, but they all did a call on. It's a, you know, the sect doesn't have an infinite supply

of these guys who are super skilled and super committed. So you really want to treat them well. And it's interesting, actually, almost from a European perspective, they, in Alamot's, the assassins headquarters in Persia. They used to keep a roll call. It was very much like an English village. We have the war memorial and the monuments. And they kept monuments to named individuals who died on certain hits.

It was important that they were remembered. You know, Lest we forget, applied just as much to the assassins as it did to First World War. These were not crazed idiots. These were people fighting to their communities. I want to go back to talk a little bit about the origins of the two

groups. And I guess, you know, we're in Assassin's Creed world where the assassins are actually the good guys. So let's start with the assassins. How does the order that we would call assassins today come about? Where does it originate from? In the same ways Christianity is split over the years into a multitude of different groups. So Islam split and, you know, the primary split was Sunni and Shiite. And one fragment of Shiism was Ishmael, which became the Fatimid Empire in Egypt and so on, just bordering onto the Holy Land. Then, of course, like all human structures, they decided to split as well, particularly radical human structures. So in around about 1194, the Vizier of Egypt, he's kind of like the chief

exec, who actually does most of the operating. Yeah, he's the chief operating officer. The Caliph, the religious leader of the Fatimid died, and the vizier decided that he wanted somebody very, very pliant and pliable to take over, rather than the chosen successor, which was a guy called Nizar. And Nizar went into revolt, his followers went with him, they got beaten, and Nizal was killed, he was executed. So you think, okay, well, that's the end of the story. That's a fairly predictable story. But they were very radical, very committed people, even in those days. And Nizar and his followers went off to Persia. They escaped to Persia, where there were other ishmaelis.

And those other ishmaelis led by the leader called Hassan, Hassan the first, as he became, on their side. So they went over and they became Nizari ishmaelis as opposed to the Fatimid, ishmaelis. And then over time, they sent missionaries out into Syria, primarily because they didn't like the Turks. And the Turks are usually Sunni. So they were fighting against the Turks in Persia, but they sent out missionaries to try and establish a foothold in Syria as well. And that's where we get to the point in Assassin's Creed, eventually, you know, 100 years on, you've got this set of assassin castles.

Or really, we should be calling them Nizari ishmael. But, you know, it's a bit of a mouthful. You know, stick with us off and say they have a huge range of castles. They've got their own little principality there. And they're fighting to convert, but they're also biking to survive. They've been through an awful lot of, you know, pogroms and massacos and so on. they're the kind of least popular kid in the class, and they've been given a good kicking many times, and they respond by developing the Fidias, which is their way of saying, we haven't

got a big army, you've got a huge army, you can give us a kicking on one level, but we can come in, we can kill you, we can kill your wife, we can kill your children. And, you know, so there is this kind of, it's the classic guerrilla thing almost, where there's an asymmetry of assets and an asymmetry of application of violence. So, so, so, Saladin's got his army of 30,000, they can ride in, destroy an assassin's phyllis army of 20, and they can get to him, and they can, you know, they can, they can, they can, incredibly pose a real threat to his life and his family, all of which are hugely important. I think it's really interesting in the book how you point out that both these small groups,

the assassins and the Templars, are really, they're operating as force multipliers. You know, like you say, it's 30,000 versus 20, but somehow the assassin's, assassins find a way to make that 20 work better than 30,000 in some cases. They're really working on what they do have and making the absolute most of it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the Templars is an uncanny parallel strategy for very similar reasons. And you find the Templars at Morgiza, which is a big battle, Saladin's first significant battle against the Crusaders in the early 1170s. The Templars take the center stage of the Christian army. The Christians are massively outnumbered, but the Templar squadron is the tip of the spear, and they target Saladin.

They can see his flags, they can see where his bodyguards are, and they just go for it. And the numbers are extraordinary. So his army, which included most of the Egyptian army at that point, ran to about 20,000, we think. The Templar squadron was 84 guys, but they're bonkers. So they're like a missile. You know, you can have an army of 10,000, but if a missile is aiming at the center of that army and that general, it might still get through.

And the Templars almost did. One of their guys got within a couple of meters of Saladin. They killed one with his relatives. They punched their way through. And the whole army of 20,000 guys broke. Saladin was nearly killed. He managed to run away using a racing camel. And most of his men were wiped out over the next.

10 days when the army disintegrated. So it's light with the assassins. It's a force multiplier, and it's focused towards the production of your community. So the Christian community in the Middle East, obviously is substantial in the Holy Land, but it's part on the fringes of big Islamic Empire, so they're hugely outnumbered. The assassins, similarly, they're a kind of Ishmaelie radical group. A lot of the Sunnis think they're heretics. So they're really aching to give them a good kicking as well.

And the only way these guys can protect themselves is by projecting force in a pinpoint fashion. You know, so Saladin's got the shotgun of a huge army, but they've got the sniper rifle of a really well-armed dagger in the back of the neck. Yeah, yeah, that's a perfect analogy, I think. I was desperately trying to think of a way to explain it. And I was thinking of them being something like the equivalent of a longbow when the English medieval army goes over to the continent. And people simply don't know how to deal with that weapon. is a kind of a strange little thing that you think shouldn't make any impact, but it changes everything. It's that kind of effect, isn't it?

Yeah, it's the asymmetry again, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Do you have a preferred explanation for how we arrive at the term assassins for the Dinizami El Shemales? Yes, yes. I mean, I think it is drugs. That's a simple answer. You know, kids don't do them, but assassins, that's what they're named after. They are hashashin. But that's sort of just the best. beginning, they called assassins by their enemies because these guys were so committed to the cause that their enemies could only explain it by saying they're absolutely nutters and they've been tricked and that they've been given drugs and they act, blah, blah, blah. So it's a very insulting term and it's an insulting way of explaining the dedication of the Fidias. And I actually, for the reasons

we were talking about earlier, I don't believe it's true. I mean, the last thing you want, have something, you know, relaxing just before you go into, onto your massive hit. I mean, the other thing, bizarrely, I think, is that the assassins weren't totally unhappy. I mean, the phrase itself doesn't necessarily mean you're a mad junkie. When they soon as use it, it's more used in the sense of junkie low life. You know, so you might call somebody a junkie low life doesn't necessarily mean that you think that they are literally, you know, heroin addict. It can just mean that they're, you know, scum of the earth, which, which was, they were often called by the soon as well. So I think there's an element of a, it's a social

element to it, as then they will look down on as being socially from the lower orders, whether that was true or not. And from the assassin's point of view, in funny sort of way, I think they might have welcomed it. You know, there is, it's part of the multiply, you know, assassins and Templars were both secretly happy, I think, sometimes not so secretly, that people thought they were not as, because that is the fear factor. When you got those 84 Templars or the 13 Fideus coming at you, it's an oh my God moment. It's not just, you know, it's not 13 ordinary guys. These are people that really make your blood run cold. Yeah, it's funny how it's a derogatory name given to them by their enemies, and yet it actually

reinforces precisely what they're trying to do because it puts this air of mystery around them that they can't be doing the things that they're doing as humans. They must be somehow enhanced because what they're doing is so beyond what they should be able to achieve. And that weirdly plays into exactly what the assassins want you to believe. Exactly. Exactly. On a sensible day, they would have said, well, this is a travesty. But actually, in terms of the overall PR strategy, it's, you know, it's bang on the money. Yeah, that's exactly, you want your enemies to think, that you're crazed and fearless and that you're going to hunt them down to the, you know, across years, across space, across time.

Yeah. And they did. So in the game, we play as a fictitious assassin named Al-Tayr. Given the secretive nature of what they did, do we have a good idea? I mean, you mentioned that some assassins' names were memorialized. You've mentioned Sinan, the old man of the mountain. Are there some key people who we do know the names of that are close to? involved in the assassins, particularly around the time of the Third Crusade?

Yeah, I mean, less so in terms of the Fidias. I'm not aware of a lot of bats having survived. I mean, the problem with the assassins and the Templars is that most of their records have gone, you know, and a lot of the contemporary stuff were really struggling with. But the Templars' archives were all lost. The assassins were eventually, you know, destroyed by the Mongols in Iran. They weren't going to be looking after the archives. You know, they were going to be lighting fires.

but we do know, you know, we do know from chronicles, sometimes written by their enemies, you know, that they did memorialize people, think it's, and they're leaders we often have the names for. So Sinan is a real person, really wacky guy. I mean, he is very, actually very open-minded. He's quite a Renaissance man by some of our standards, because he was, he was the one who was negotiating with the Christians, with the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, to go into a full-scale alliance. and that was going to be intellectual as well as political. Now, it never happened because the Templars butted in and killed all of the assassin diplomats who were doing that.

I mean, they did hate each other's guts. But Sinan was a very real character. He was a superb leader. He built lots of castles. He had a really good strategy. He kept his people safe and strong. But he was also very open-minded, you know, as we were saying earlier, you know,

although in the 12th century, Catholics and most Muslims were fairly, you know, fairly buttoned down in terms of what their religious belief was. The assassins were not more kind of, you know, are we, you know, faults on both sides, they were quite strangely, quite tolerant and certainly quite intellectually inquisitive, which can be very appealing. Yeah, it's an interesting dichotomy, isn't it? Because you tend to think of them as almost like fundamentalists, like this really hard, group who you kind of assume probably are driven by their religious beliefs to a fundamental

level. And actually, they're some of the most liberal Muslims in Near East at the time, as you say, willing to talk to Christians, willing to countenance, conversion to Christian, willing to deal in Christian religious doctrine and things like that. It's perhaps, again, the opposite of what we might have thought the assassins were about. Yeah, they're an really interesting group and they're always surprising. And I'm I have to say, it's not definite that they were proposing becoming Christian. I think the Christians were perhaps fooling themselves, but they were certainly prepared to set off on the journey of a rapprochement with the Crusaders

in a way that was intellectual as well as military. They were people who were defending their communities, but they were also, yeah, they were out there as well. I have to say, it's like with any human groups, they also change over time. So Sinan and his mate back in Persia, Hassan second, were the ones who helped push the idea of the resurrection. So they were both comfortable with leaving Sharia law and, you know, as part of this broader view of the intellectual landscape,

certainly compared to some other parts of Islam. But then at other points in Nizari, Shmeli, history, they were very, very orthodox. So it goes up and down. But, yeah, always rising. And so in the game, we get to visit, for example, Masyaf, Castle as a base of the assassins. Is Mashchev Castle real? What do we know about the castle? Yeah, absolutely. I think the assassins crooked over in 1140, so they've been in command for 50 years.

Sinan wasn't around at the time, but when he came to power in 1162, he strengthened it all. He strengthened the whole network and put in communication systems, you know, things like pigeons, carry a pigeons going around. Very, very good command and control. Yeah, and it's a very impressive place, I mean, particularly at the time. It sort of raises one of the other biggest issues that no one ever talks about. And it's kind of like Tolkien and his elves, you know, which is, you know, what the woodland creatures live off. What's the economics of being a woodland creature? And I'm always fascinated about the assassins in that way as well.

They live up in the mountains. They build these huge castles and loads of them, you know, anywhere up to, you know, people talk about 70, 80. You know, I mean, some big, some small. And we know the costs that the Crusaders had to build the castle. I mean, how on earth does it become feasible to do that? And I think part of it, and this applies to synony and as all the others, it does explain why this very secretive, semi-isolated group were very often prepared to hire out their services. So they'd often be killing people at the behest of one of their Sunni enemies, bizarrely.

But I think they were just strapped for cash the whole thing. time. And interestingly, when the Mongols conquered them and looted everything, they made the point of saying, these guys don't have any decent treasures. We're not even going to send it back home to the Khan, you know, because he's not going to be impressed. So I think they, you know, they were fierce as mountain lions, but, you know, poor as church mice as well. And yeah, no, and Sinan was a great guy. He was really, really tough and did look after his people very well. I suppose in Assassin's Creed terms, we want to get on to the bad guys, big boo for the Templars. Can you tell us quite briefly how the Templars come into being?

How long have they been around by the Third Crusade? Yeah, so the Templars come into being around about 1119, 1120. Interestingly, the timeline, but I think people assume Templars and the assassins are both very ancient secretive orders, you know, going back to the pharaohs or whatever. And, of course, it's not true. The Templars were quite a new body in the 1190s, and so too were the assassins in Syria. I mean, they'd only been, both of them were coming into the area about the same time, early 12th century. And as we've discussed, you know, the Nizari-ishmeles didn't exist before 1194 to when Nizal was executed.

Yeah, they both have, again, this strangely parallel timeline. The assassins have been around in Syria since, what, early 1100s. They've struggled to create a kind of safe place. They've tried to inveigle their way into some of the big. urban centres, like Damascus or Aleppo, and it always works for a short while, and then people don't like having these heretics around, so they massacre them, and they're forced into the mountains. And with people like Sinan in charge, they really make the best of a rubbish political hand. You know, they end up with the rubbish least economically viable

parts of the Middle East. And the reason that they can get in there is because not many other people want to be there. And then when they're there, they managed to turn it into a really viable kind of military network. And that's a safe place for them to then develop a strategy and push back out against our enemies in the rest of the world. We've dealt with where the name for assassins come from. Where does the name for the Templars come from? Yeah, again, it's a, we know it, but it's not true. They were, they were, they were, their early headquarters at the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, which the assassins thought was the Temple of Solomon. The crusade of a wrong, though.

It is, I think it's pretty much what we'd call the Alaksa mosque now, which actually postates that significantly. But it's a catchy name, you know, and it's sort of like, and it's sort of to your point about the assassins as well, they've both ended up with catchy names because this cult of death rests to large part on them having a larger than life. image. And I think they're both, you know, I think a branding agency, you know, in the 21st century would tell you you could do a lot worse than assassins and templars. They're powerful brands that actually say what the promise is. It's a promise of death. Well, I mean, here we are

more than 800 years later, still talking about the brand recognition of the assassins and the Templars, you know, somebody should have got a decent paycheck for that bit of work. And we've talked a bit about how the assassins became this kind of force multiplier. How what makes the Templars able to do that too? Because again, we're talking about normally fairly small groups of night. What distinguishes them from all of the other European knights that are arriving in the Holy Land around this time? Yeah, that's a very good point. I think discipline is the key thing and commitment, which again is what you find with the assassins. These are guys who give themselves up totally to the objectives of their sect or order. So in the

same ways, the assassins are totally enthrall or totally obedient to the the old man of the mountain, you find the Templars the same. They've got a very, very tight rule book called the rule of the Templar. They're sort of, they take monastic vows of a certain kind. They are totally devoted. And because they're in the Middle East and they're in the saddle the whole time, they are superb soldiers. And they're used to maneuvering together. They know exactly what to do under all the different circumstances. And warfare in the East is very different. Whereas if you look at the European knights that come over on Crusade, you know, they're much less well trained

because mostly they're doing a bit of carousing at home. You know, they don't get to fight in really vicious warfare very often. They don't get to maneuver because they're all spread out around different countries. And they don't know how to deal with these, you know, Turkey cavalry.

They don't have to deal with artillery when they're in Europe. So the Templars are, they look very similar on one level. You know, you think, oh, a cavalry charge, medievalized charging, da-da-da, they must be the same. But in fact, the Templars, were so much better at it,

because they were disciplined, they pushed it through, you know, and they knew where to hit. Like at Morgizar, you identify, that's how you get a much more mobile enemy to succumb.

You point at the one point of vulnerability where they're a fixed item, you know, where the baggage train is, where the general is, where the flags are, and you try and cut it off at the neck, you know. Yeah, I think,

I think it's a hard one to pin down because they don't really have a technological edge, but they do have discipline and an ideological edge. You know, it's, again, back to your point about, you know, keen or willing. You know, they're not keen to die, but they're certainly willing to do it. And they know in themselves, they have this belief that it's effectively being on the

fast track to heaven if you do that. You know, it's not something you seek, because that would be suicide, but it's something that you embrace. If in doing so, you can fight for your community. There's almost like a chicken and egg question to be had here about, are the best knights with all of the best tactical Nouse seeking out the Templars, or is there something about the way the Templars train their brothers that turn them into these elite fighting knights with better discipline

and better understanding of battle tactics than anybody else? So are the Templars drawing the best to them, or are the Templars forging the best out of what they get? Yeah, I think you're right first time, chicken and egg. I think the Templars have a mechanism for turning strong, brave, committed people into this kind of superhuman military machine. They've got a welcome pack in the form of the, you know, the rule of the Templars where people absorb that and they're turned out like a regimen in a way that most medieval

troops really aren't. So they do have the kind of secret ingredient to turn a good warren. into a great one. But equally, I think once that image process is underway, and if you're a really enthusiastic, top-em sort of guy looking to do your bit, then naturally you're going to choose Templars. So I think that it encouraged people, people who wanted that kind of lifestyle, who wanted that elite status, you know, so it might not be a monetary elite status, but it was, it's like being James Bond or whatever. You know, there's a James Bond element to this, you know, women want him and men want to be him, you know, and so you get the men who want to be him

joining up. So you get the best quality recruits join the organisation that can do the most with those great qualities. And it's a, yeah, it's a very, very good thing. I quite like the idea that the rule, you know, it's like being handed your onboarding manual on your first day and a job, but this one says, you know, welcome to a guaranteed path to heaven through death on the battlefield. You know, hang on, what? That's page one. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, interestingly, you know, so we're talking about PR departments, but we're also taking. looking about HR departments. And I think that's one of the big things that the Templars did in the Third Crusade. It's very difficult to prove because unlike modern HR departments, we don't

have an email trail. But we do know that normally crusading armies in the early days go out to the Middle East and they are shocked because warfare out there is so different. It's like the Wild West. You know, you're surrounded by light cavalry archers, you're stunned, you're outnumbered. It's a shocking debilitating form of warfare for somebody who's used to facing a few peasants and, you know, just generally riding around saying we need a change of management. But when Richard and his army arrives in the Latin East, you find them doing extraordinary things. So they're forming a kind of, they do a fighting march down the coast of Palestine, which is an incredibly complex and difficult formation. It's the kind of thing that the Templars knew all about, but those

English guys didn't, you know, and yet they hit ground running. And then similarly, they get down to Jaffer for a battle a few months later. And there are almost no knights, but the infantry they've got, whether English or Italian rowers, whatever, they're forming very, you know, almost like they've got salvo, volley fire. You know, and you have tiny groups where you get two guys in the front with the crossbows, two guys behind with shield and spears. You get very sophisticated. tactical answers to a problem that they couldn't possibly have solved if they hadn't been taught. If somebody hadn't told them in advance, this is what we've got to do. You couldn't, you couldn't explain it. And I think Richard, you know, he was clearly a ferocious leader in his

own right, but I think he was man enough to talk to people who knew better than him. And I think, you know, that Templars and Hospitlers were there in his court every day. And they were, they were imparting their knowledge. So the welcome pack started in London rather than, rather than, than when you hit the ghost of palis spy. Yeah, it's interesting. We think of Richard as this great general leader, warrior, fierce individual. But like you say, that is only a result of his preparation that was done in advance of being willing to say, I'm going somewhere I don't know, to fight enemies I don't understand.

Here are the Templars. You can explain all of this to me. I'm going to make good use of that so that, like you say, I can arrive and hit the deck running. And that is a big portion of the reason for his success. Yeah, very much so. You know, you're doing it, it's again, apropos your earlier point, really, you're dealing with very good material.

So, you know, as in why do, who joins the Templars? You know, he's superb military material, but he's man enough to know the things, to want to know the things he doesn't know. And I guess the Templars are good enough as well to be that force multiplier again to say, if we get into the ear of the King of England, we can, you know, improve this entire army so that the small handful of Templar knights

are making thousands and thousands of Christian soldiers more effective in the Holy Land. You're 100% right. And you see this probably even more distinctively in the Second Crusade, where you get, you know, the French army wanders over. And I've got a tiny Templar contingent. But the French army is so ill-disciplined, you know, in fairness to them, they're behaving just like European armies normally do. They weren't any better or worse, but they were just rubbish when it came to fighting their way against Turkic cavalry in the middle of nowhere.

So after they've been cut up quite a lot, this tiny Templar contingent were told to take over. And this was hugely embarrassing for the king, but Louis was, you know, he was man enough to do it. And everybody in the army, thankfully, had to take an oath, probably became a Templar associate. So they were all subject to Templar Dispun. So again, to your point, the Templars may only have been. a hundred or two guys, but they transformed the whole army. And they did manage to get quite a lot of it through to the Middle East. And I guess we've kind of talked a little bit as we've been going about the interplay between the assassins and the Templars, which is at the absolute core of

the Assassin's Creed franchise of games. And Assassin's Creed paints them as kind of mortal enemies. One of the things that I really took away from your book is just how similar in so many ways the assassins and the Templars were, and yet do they end up being the mortal enemies that we're given in Assassin's Creed? Do Assassins and Templars hate each other? Do they not really encounter each other? How do they deal with each other in the Holy Land in the Third Crusade? Yeah, that's a very good part. And it is surprising. I think if you're talking about assassins and crusaders, there's a surprisingly good relationship by and large. Wouldn't protect you. If you annoyed the assassins, they'd still murder you.

But also, I guess if they're for hire and they want money and Crusaders have got money, exactly. What's a girl to do? You've got a girl's going to make a living. So, yeah, definitely. But there's no intrinsic animosity between the Crusaders and the assassins, which sounds weird, but it's logical. You know, the Crusaders don't take much interest in Muslim interfighting on a religious

basis. They don't care if you're Sunni or Shiite or whatever. For them, it's, you know, there are other bigger issues around, you know, politics and military things. Whereas for a lot of their Muslim neighbours, they really hated the assassins because they were, you know, these crazy murdering heretics as they were caricatured. So there is that whole underlying lack of animosity with the Crusaders. Funny enough, the Templars and the hospitlers to a lesser extent are the exception to that. They really, really did hate each other. And I think it's partly, I propose your first point, which is that they're so similar. You know, love and hate being, you know, in some ways, you know, adjoining rather than oppositional emotions, there is that,

there's an intensity about their relationship that's very unusual. And you also find that through an accident of geography, you know, I was saying earlier that the assassins go to Syria, they take up these great mountains and develop them into a fortress network. Those mountains are on the edge of the crusader state called the County of Tripoli, or Prince Ponte of Antioch, but mainly Tripoli. And because the counts of Tripoli can't control those boundaries anymore, they tend to give it to people who've got enough commitment to do it, and that's by and large the hospitlers and the Templars.

So you get this very prosaic, some landlord-tenant, relationship as well. So the hospitlers and the Templars, basically they extort money from the assassins. Huge, by assassin terms, huge amounts of money. And they're able to do that because they're so similar. Because if the count of Tripoli told the assassins that they needed to pay them, you know, 50 grand a year, they'd say, well, that's an interesting thought, but we know where your wife goes to get a hair cut. You know, that kind of thing.

Whereas with the Templars, there's no vulnerability. They don't have individuals within the order who aren't replaceable. If you kill the master, he'll be replaced by a temporary replacement or a permanent one, you know, by the following day. If you kill, you know, they don't have families, they're not married. They're sort of, they're not vulnerable to the promise of death that's offered by the assassin. So every other political unit in the Middle East is scared of them because they're basically family businesses. But the Templars and the Hospitals are corporations. And again, that sort of works with the assassins as well.

It doesn't matter how many Fideus you kill. It doesn't matter. They've already made that choice. They're not scared of dying in the same ways a good Templar knightism. So, yeah, there is that love, hate thing. And you find the thing between the Templars and the assassins does rumble on down through the years, even in the 1240s and so on. And the Templars insert themselves into Christian diplomacy with the assassins to make sure that they give them a good kicking whenever they can.

There is something visceral about it. And I think it's because they know each other too well. And I guess for both those organisations, if they're quite similar, they understand just how dangerous the other ones are. Because, you know, the Templars understand what they do with such relatively small resources, at least in terms of numbers, if not money later on. they know what they can do and they can see that the assassins can do the same thing. So they understand perhaps better than other parties in the region on either side, just how dangerous those groups could be and why you shouldn't trust them and why you should try and deal with them.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it is a weird love, hate, respect, knowledge kind of thing, all going on at the same time. I was struck again from the book, I'm glad you drew that point out a little bit earlier. The difference between the idea that so much in the medieval world is a family business and yet organisations like the assassins and the Templars are much more like a corporation

so that there isn't that ability to understand that the person at the top is absolutely critical in their own body if their heir is a child they are incredibly fragile because their dynasty will fall

if they're not very, very careful you simply don't have that issue with organisations like the Templars and the assassins like you say you cut one head off and another one is growing back by the next morning And that's difficult for other people to comprehend who are used to this idea that your son is your heir and the next generation relies entirely on him. The next generation could be the guy stood next to the guy you just killed, who's better than him. No, you're absolutely right.

I mean, that is, you know, it's interesting. We're sitting here talking about these two tiny corporations 800 years after the event. We're not talking about the family dynasty of the Council of Tripoli to any large extent. You know, they're invisible now. they die when their DNA dies, and it's literal DNA, it's not corporate DNA. And you find organizations like the papacy are the same in a way, and the Templars are the kind of the militant arm of the papacy. They're a corporation that supports to a corporate head office. So one pope dies, you know, which they do frequently because they're quite old and then another one gets chosen.

You can't take out the papacy. I mean, that's one of the extraordinary things about it. How would you kind of sum up the impact of the Templars and the assassins to fairly small, I mean, I guess, you know, relatively not massively long-lived organizations in a region that's at conflict at war? Is it easy to overstate their impact, or are they actually, do they have a huge legacy in the region and in this period? Yeah, no, that was a really good point. I think it does kind of speak for itself. You know, the fact that we are having this conversation shows that they had a huge impact.

With both of them, they've got a huge impact on the internet, through the gaming industry, through publishing and what have you. And that, it would be nice to think, oh, it's an accident, but clearly it isn't. You know, that doesn't happen by accident. They did have a clarity of purpose, which is just very impressive, and that's resonated down through the ages. I think they were both helped by quite specific things as well, and the fact that all the Templar records were destroyed

means that they're now famous because we can impose our own they can't have de la Raza so we can impose our own stories, our own conspiracies, you know, however fantastical, we can put them onto the Templars and they're fine, they can't answer back and we haven't got the records.

So the hospitlers are now fairly amiable, you know, handing out oranges at football matches, you know, the, you know, St John's ambulance and so on. You know, they've morphed into a sort of more benign, but low-profile kind of non-conspiratorial group. The Templars who were not that different, really, have become these kind of macro,

you know, Marvel-type figures. And I think that's true to the assassins as well. They didn't get wiped out like the Templars, but they did get effectively neutered as a political or military force by bars and under Mamluks. And if that hadn't happened, the Mongols would have seen them off anyway. So both groups were coming to an end. They'd both had a beginning and an end from a kind of macro political sense. But they'd both had this kind of PR resonance that lives longer than that.

And I think also I think there is a thing, I know it, I can see it in myself. Because I'm fairly boring because I, you know, open my laptop. I think I've done something really clever. You know, whereas these guys are so resourceful and they achieve so much with so little that you can't, even though you might not agree with. everything they're doing or their objectives even, you kind of think, you end up rooting for them just because they're not us. And it's sort of quite good to see what the human spirit can achieve when it focus itself,

for good or bad, on things with clarity. And I realise that we've talked a bit about Sinan, the old man of the mountain, kind of leader of the assassins during the Third Crusade. We've not really talked about who was in charge of the Templars. And he's a figure who appears in the game. players will duel with Robert de Sabley. So is he really the leader of the Templars? Does he die during the Third Crusade? Yeah, that is all true. Yeah, absolutely. Sadly, we know more about him before he became a Templar, but he was a real character. And again, we haven't got a lot of flesh to call on the bones. But when you look at his career, it's obvious that the guy had huge charisma and talent. You know, he's a really butch diplomat. He's, you know, he's able to mediate for kings, between, you know, different armies, and he's doing really well there. He's a military

man. So before he becomes a Templar, he's one of Richard the Lionheart's admirals. Being an admiral was very largely a kind of more like a land-based military role in those days, of course. And then because Richard is leading, you know, most of the Third Crusade, the Templars quite rightly think, I know what, will take one of Richard's key allies and make him the master of the entire order. And it's fabulous. It's an area where you can see Templar diplomacy working really well. And I think it also plays into our conversation about, you know, the HR arm of the Templars.

You know, you basically take the guy who's closest to Richard and you make him the Templar. You impart all the Templar knowledge. And in this, and that's not arcane knowledge. It's knowledge of how to deal with Turkish cavalry, you know, those kind of knowledge. And then you inject that into the... the whole of the crusade. So it's a very clever, very simple but clever. It's that corporate thinking again, isn't it, of head-hunting someone who can bring the connections that can improve your business, no end? Absolutely. You know, you go to your

executive search people, you say, I want, you know, the best CEO for the corporation at this time. He doesn't need to be there forever, you know, but he is there at the right time at the right place, and he's bossed in to make sure that Richard feels comfortable knowing that the Templars are You know, they're close. They're really close allies, and they can really help. And they recognize in Richard, somebody who can make a crusade happen, and they're the ones who can make it better. So it's a wonderfully symbiotic thing.

And Robert Sablet died quite early on. I mean, I do love Assassin's Creed, what I've seen of it. But I love it from the same sense that I love Kingdom of Heaven. You know, it's not historically accurate, but it never pretends to be. You know, if you were judging it as a lecture series, you'd say, well, it's not accurate. But if you judge it as a game that gives you a kind of intimate sense of time and place, it's superb. So you can see how it works really well. I think that the danger with academics is that you're inclined to judge everything from your own perspective

rather than the perspective of the media you're working with. So Kingdom of Heaven, sumptuous, you know, just looks beautiful. And it's, you know, some of the history is a bit crazy. But it sucks you into that world. and I think that's where Assassin's Creed is great as well. It introduces that part of history to a lot of people who wouldn't have ever had any reason to know anything about it at all. I mean, this has been absolutely fascinating, Stephen.

I fear I could do this all day quite happily and never get bored of talking to you about these things. But obviously, if people want to know more, they can definitely go and get your book and immerse themselves in the world of the assassins and the Templars. But before we finish, I like to give guests the opportunity to step into the Assassin's Creed animus and be transported in full safety,

you will be returned back to 2025. Back to a moment. So is there a moment in assassin or Templar history, a battle or an encounter that you wish that you could see, that you would love to witness? Yeah, actually, yeah, it's a very good question. There is just one particular assassin hit that doesn't work. And I like it because it kind of doesn't work.

And that's the first significant attack on Saladin. So they're almost there. There's 13 guys go in. They get to his tent. They're just outside the tent. And then somebody says, hold on. You look familiar. What are you doing here?

You know, and it's like, simple question, what are you doing here? But there's no simple answer other than, oh, we've come to kill Saladin. And then all hell breaks loose. And it's, and they carve their way through a lot of bodyguards and so on. And that, to me, it's a failure, but it's the assassins sort of at their best. You know, they managed to get so close. And then there's another story I love as well. If I can have two, another little one,

there's a classic one that shows how the assassins are human as well. There's an attack on a Muslim castle in Shazhar, which is the lovely fortified town and castle. And 100 assassins kind of blacked their way in, start carving their way through the garrison and everything. And they then get beaten by a bunch of middle-aged ladies who are left behind. All the garrison have gone off,

carousing, you know, they're off at a party. So the whole place is empty. And these middle-aged women and slaves jam all the doors, they hand up the armor amongst themselves. They get ready to kill themselves if they get, you know, if they get attacked. They are, you know, they stand by the balconies, you know, with their swords. So it's either death or death one way or the other, you know, you kill the enemy or suicide. And the assassins are rubbish. They, they mess up the whole thing and the men come back and wipe them out to a single man. But I go on about it a lodge in the book because I just think it's lovely. It's a personal antidote to the kind of ninja-esque aspects of it. They were super at what they did, but none of us is, you know, perfect.

Yeah, definitely we should put them up on a pedestal, but then give that pedestal a wobble every once in a while just to remind them. Very much. This has been absolutely fascinating, Steve. Thank you so much for joining us here on Echoes of History. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you, Matt. You're great, as ever. I hope you enjoyed this visit to Echoes of History. Download a growing back catalogue and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from. Thanks to Steve Tibble 2. You can find his book, Assassins and Templars, A Battle in Myth and Blood, in All Good Bookshops now.

You can also find Steve's previous visits to gone medieval in our back catalogue. He's talked to us about the Templars in Britain and about Crusader criminals, two episodes, well worth digging out. out. There are new installments have gone medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Merry Christmas and a happy new year. Anyway, I'd better let you go and get back to mince pies, sherry and whatever

great history books you've had for Christmas. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.