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Assassin's Creed Hexe

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Gameplay

Assassin's Creed: Hexe will be a more linear entry in the Assassin's Creed series, breaking away from the modern format. It is set in Central Europe, during the 16th century Holy Roman Empire. The protagonist is Elsa, a witch of sorts with alleged supernatural abilities, such as possessing animals and controlling them. The fear system from the Assassin's Creed: Syndicate downloadable expansion Jack the Ripper is rumored to make a comeback, with Elsa relying heavily on it to fight back against the Holy Roman Empire's soldiers.

Echoes of History transcripts

Assassins vs Templars

34

The Knights Templar

• Woman’s Voice: History Hit and Assassin’s Creed presents Assassins vs. Templars. Real histories of the secret orders.
• Matthew Lewis: Welcome to the inside of one of history's greatest stories. I'm Matt Lewis, and in this collaboration between Ubisoft and History Hit, we're taking you back to the very beginning. The story of Assassin's Creed is one of deadly rivalry between conflicting ideologies that asks whether peace is found through freedom or control. It began with assassins and Templars racing to gather the pieces of Eden in the fiery heat of the Near East amidst brutal religious upheaval. Now we're all Desmond Miles, and we've even found our Animus. A team of the greatest historians working in their field today will help us unlock the memories of the past, lead us through their secrets, and introduce us to some of the real people who inspired the game. It's time to break into the vaults of two of history's most infamous organizations as we pit the Assassin's Creed against the Templar Order. In this episode, I'm joined by Professor Helen Nicholson, who is a professor of medieval history and former head of history at Cardiff University. She's a world-leading expert on the military religious orders and the crusades, which makes her the perfect guide to lead us through the mysteries of the Knights Templar. Thank you very much for joining us, Helen. It's wonderful to have you here.
• Helen Nicholson: Thank you for having me.
• Matthew Lewis: Assassin's Creed pits the Assassins against the Templar Order. When does the Order of the Knights Templar emerge and become a military order?
• Helen Nicholson: No one recorded exactly when they started, but it seems to be January 1120 at the Council of Nablus in the Holy Land, when the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the King of Jerusalem were both present. They approved this idea by Hudepin and his friends that they should form a military group for defending Christian pilgrims, also for defending Christian land.
• Matthew Lewis: And there's a bit of a movement of military religious orders at this point. Where do the Templars sit in that? Are they the first?
• Helen Nicholson: Templars were the first military religious order as such, although we could argue they were continuing the idea of the First Crusade, and some writers linked them back to the First Crusade and said that they were knights who'd been on the First Crusade and had decided to stay in the Holy Land, and that they saw the land needed protectors. Now, these are people writing slightly later, so it's not clear this is entirely accurate, but it gives us an idea of where the ideas came from. At the same time, you could see the idea of the Templars, a brotherhood in arms, serving God, could also come from the confraternities, the brotherhoods that have formed during the Crusade. And it wasn't a new idea for Christians to fight in defence of Christendom, but it's the Templars who became the first permanent and professional military religious force.
• Matthew Lewis: And what do we know about Hugues de Payens, that man who is credited with starting the Templars? Why did he want to build this military order?
• Helen Nicholson: There's a certain amount of information about Hugues de Payens' life in Champagne. Before he went out to the East, he'd been married, his wife's name was Elizabeth, and she died, they had a number of children, and he'd gone out to the East with Hugh, Count of Champagne, on at least one expedition to the East. Exactly when he'd arrived in the East before he founded the Templars is not clear. And then there were a number of other people who were with him at the beginning of the order, Godfrey of St. Omer, for example, and we don't know exactly when they got there. All we can say is that they all seemed to be together in about 1120.
• Matthew Lewis: And in the game in Assassin's Creed, we see the Templars working in the Third Crusade in the 1190s. Why are military orders springing up in the build-up to that period in the 12th century? What are they a reaction to?
• Helen Nicholson: There's two things going on which we ought to take into account. One is big upheaval in the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church in Europe, that is. Not just the noble people who could afford to become monks, but now people not from the noble classes were joining the Church and forming originally ad hoc groups of hermits living in caves in Italy or Spain. And these become acknowledged by the Church as a good idea and become formal orders. We can see the Templars as being an offshoot from this, lay people coming together and forming their own religious group. The Church had become more willing to acknowledge these individual small group ideas, a bit more bottom-up than top-down. The other aspect was the rise of ideas of knighthood, chivalry as it becomes known from the French chevalier, which just means knighthood. And the Templars fit into these ideas of knights can serve God simply by being knights. There is a standard of behavior that they should adhere to, protecting other people at the risk of their own lives, laying down their own lives in defense of others, particularly those that can't defend themselves. So women, the elderly, children, Church people, who are only supposed to fight in self-defense and are probably not trained to fight. So the Templars combine these ideas of new religious life and idealized knighthood. But they're not quite like most secular knights because they concentrate on the austerity which is characteristic of religious orders. And they're not operating as individuals. As anyone who's read the stories of King Arthur would know, they're very much focused on individual knights, but Templars operate as a group, they're a community. So they have this communal lifestyle, communal mindset.
• Matthew Lewis: So it sounds like they were a reaction to quite a few things that were going on at the time. Is it fair to see them as a thoroughly modern movement at the time?
• Helen Nicholson: Oh yes, cutting edge were the Templars when they were founded. The very latest thing in religious ideology and secular movement, which was one reason they were so popular among ordinary people, anyone who could afford to give them something indeed, down to when I die, they can have my horse.
• Matthew Lewis: And you mentioned that the primary purpose of the Templars was to protect Christian pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. Were they successful in that?
• Helen Nicholson: Yes, on the whole, they were. And the Hospitalers who became militarized a bit after the Templars, they started off as a hospital and then they take up military activities for the same reason as the Templars, pilgrims need protection. They commissioned ships and then they have their own ships to carry people from the West to the Holy Land. And the great advantage of traveling with the Templars or the Hospitalers was you could be pretty sure you'd get there and you wouldn't get sold as a slave on the way. And then they would escort you along the pilgrim routes. It looks a little bit like a package tour.
• Matthew Lewis: I was going to say, it sounds a lot like buying a package tour with a tour rep coming with you. But I wondered whether I was being a bit naughty saying that.
• Helen Nicholson: Some scholars have made this comparison with a perfectly straight face and others have said that it's being flippant. But I like it because although these people don't go around photographing everywhere, they go around kissing all the sites instead. So you arrive at your holy site, you go in, you pray, you kiss any relics, you kiss the holy site. And some people obviously make written records of this, which they take home with them or they write it down when they get home so other people can read about their journey and can imagine that they're making this journey too and they're visiting the various holy sites so they can stop and pray while they're reading the description of the pilgrimage. So just as people also have vicarious holidays where they're watching other people's photographs or watch something on the television, you can have your vicarious pilgrimage.
• Matthew Lewis: And we associate the Templars today with a particular uniform with the white robes with the red cross on. They stand out in the Assassin's Creed game for wearing that. Where does that uniform originate from and how soon do they develop that?
• Helen Nicholson: Originally, they didn't have any special clothing, but at the Council of Troyes, very near where Hugues de Payens came from, in Champagne in January 1129, the ecclesiastics who gathered there, the knights at any rate, should wear a white mantle as a sign of purity. They'd given away their old life and they're now taking on this new life. The red cross came later. Archbishop William II of Tyre, writing his history of the Crusader states from the mid 1160s to the mid 1180s, said that it was Pope Eugenius III who gave them the red cross. He was Pope during the Second Crusade, so we can assume it was about that time they were given the red cross. And the red cross represents the blood of Christ and the fact that Templars are supposed to shed their blood for other Christians on the battlefield.
• Matthew Lewis: It's a very visible marker of that duality of what they do, the white rose of the priest, but the red cross to represent blood and the martial elements of what they do too.
• Helen Nicholson: Absolutely. Visually, very striking. Non-knights didn't have the white mantle. They had to wear a dark coloured mantle, so they wouldn't have been quite so obvious.
• Matthew Lewis: And how did the Templars balance their religious duties with the military aspects of what they do? I mean, traditionally, the church frowned on people who spilled blood. How did they manage to balance those two things?
• Helen Nicholson: The church had always said, yes, that clergy shouldn't shed blood, but there are certain people in society who should be able to shed blood, even though they might have to do penance for it afterwards, because they're defending other Christians. And some of Jesus' earliest followers were actually soldiers. Some of the early Christians mentioned in the Book of Acts in the New Testament are soldiers. So clearly, you can be a soldier and serve Christ, but you're not supposed to go around murdering people. You're supposed to be serving Christ by protecting other Christians. So when the Templars take this up, it's not an entirely new idea, but the idea of ordinary knights being allowed by the church to do this, to wipe out their sins, was something that canonist church lawyers were still working on. It was part of the idea behind the First Crusade, but of course, the First Crusade was only temporary. On the other hand, taking on this monastic lifestyle suited this very well, because monks already claimed to be fighting God's battle, but in prayer. So the Templars are a militia of God, but now they're fighting physically. So that can be easily adapted to suit knights in the Order of the Temple. They have very strict discipline, as monks do. Monks are all supposed to obey their abbot, and this idea of command and control that you have in a monastic order works very well for a military order as well. Everybody should obey the master. And then he has this hierarchy of officials under him, each one knowing what their particular duties are, which again works very well for an army. And they have a very strong mission statement. Every army needs its mission statement. Whereas monks serve God in prayer and contemplation, knights serve Christ as Christ's army and lay down their lives for Christians and in protection of Christian territory. So it's not actually that difficult to reconcile the two. There are a few practical difficulties, like what you do if it's time for matins and you're all out in the field. Well then, rather than having a formal service, you might have to just recite a certain number of the Lord's Prayer, the Pater Nostris, from the horseback. So certain things had to be adapted in the regulations of the Templars as they developed over the years, as they had to adapt to deal with current conditions. There's a comment that they might have to have their sins forward forgiven before they set off on a voyage, for example, because the chance of drowning at sea when you're on your way to Europe or coming back from Europe are quite high. So you have to take precautions. But on the whole, they managed to balance their rule of life, like monks would have with their military activities as an army would need to have. And as I say, the discipline aspect is there in both monks and in warriors. So the Templars were a very disciplined force and very much admired for their discipline.
• Matthew Lewis: And I guess that mental gymnastics and that development of the rules is worth it for the Church to have such a potent force at its disposal.
• Helen Nicholson: It really was necessary to have a permanent military force out of the Crusader states. It was clear that none of the secular nobles could provide something that was permanent and that could be relied on to turn up when needed. This was always a headache in the West. When the kings of Spain are organising their campaigns against the Muslims in Spain, their nobles don't always turn up when summoned, but the Templars will always turn up.
• Matthew Lewis: Always ready for a fight.
• Helen Nicholson: It's one disadvantage, though, of the military orders being religious and only answerable in theory to the Pope, and they don't always answer to the Pope either. Because they know they're Christ's army, they often think they know best. So the King of Jerusalem might have one idea, the leader of the Crusade might have another idea, and the Templars have their own idea, and the Hospitallers have their own idea. And this will have been reinforced by prayer and discussion and their experiences in the Holy Land. And it's very difficult to talk them out of what they think. They're not actually answerable to secular authority, so they don't have to pay attention to secular authority.
• Matthew Lewis: And that must have caused problems. If everyone agrees on the aim, but nobody agrees on the way to get there.
• Helen Nicholson: Yes, it was definitely a problem during the Second Crusade. And subsequently, you needed somebody with a very strong leadership skills, charismatic character like Richard the Lionheart in the Third Crusade to keep the military orders on side.
• Matthew Lewis: How good were the Knights Templar? Do they deserve their incredible military reputation? I mean, in the game, they're seen as the natural foils to the Assassins. We know that Altaïr in the game is forced to fight Robert de Sable, the Grand Master of the Templar Order. Are they worthy rivals?
• Helen Nicholson: They were as good as their reputation. They were a team. They worked together, fought together. They knew each other's weaknesses and strengths, unlike other armies of the time. It was unusual in Europe at this time to have military forces that worked together long term, except perhaps some of the mercenary companies who would stay together for a long period. One of the reasons they get blamed for defeats is because they were seen as the elite military force in the battle. Therefore, if we lost, it must be their fault. Because we didn't expect much of the others, but the Templars we expected more of. The fact that people continue to give them donations and join the Templars right up to the end of 1307 is an indication of how successful they were seen and how highly they were regarded in the West.
• Matthew Lewis: And the game in Assassin's Creed, it pits the Templars against the Assassins as the two pinnacles of different ideologies. Do you think it's fair to see the Templars as this real pinnacle of the Christian military presence in the Holy Land?
• Helen Nicholson: Templars were certainly a pinnacle of one line of Christian ideology in the Holy Land. Of course, the various leaders of the Crusader states could never agree on what the best policy was. So, for example, the Templars and Hospitallers disagreed in the 13th century after the Third Crusade on whether they should be aligned with Egypt or Damascus. And either one could be argued, and scholars are still arguing over that one. And so, likewise, during the Third Crusade, in fact, the military orders did agree that they shouldn't go and capture Jerusalem because they didn't think they could hold it. They should go and capture Egypt first. And Richard the Lionheart decided he would do that because he respected their views. But others said, no, we should have gone to Jerusalem. And again, scholars are still arguing over that. So it's clearly not an easy decision to make.
• Matthew Lewis: How did the influence of the Templars begin to spread beyond the Holy Land? Because they would reach all the way across Christian Europe over the decades and centuries that followed their establishment.
• Helen Nicholson: The Templars had property right across Latin Christian Europe, except in Scandinavia. And they started to acquire that very, very quickly. In 1120, Count Fulk V of Anjou went to Jerusalem on pilgrimage and he joined the Templars for a short period. And then you were allowed to join as a temporary member. And then he went back to the West and continued to give them donations. And according to Orderic Vitalis, a monk from England, in fact, from the English-Welsh border, who was in the Norman monastery, he also encouraged other people to make donations to the Templars. So that's right from the very beginning of the Templars' existence. They had Fulk of Anjou agitating for them and encouraging other people to join. And Hugues de Paynes' lord, Count Hugh of Champagne, joined around 1125. Then in the Iberian Peninsula, the King of Aragon, Alfonso I, had already been trying to found his own military religious order from the early 1120s. And he clearly found it was difficult to do this, just one kingdom without the resources you need to keep it going on a long-term basis. So he ended up in 1131 when he made his will, donating his kingdom to the canons of the Holy Sepulchre. So it's the priests that run the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Hospitallers and the Templars. So that's hardly more than a decade after the Templars had been founded. They were being given a third of a kingdom, which they did not, in fact, get. And the Queen of Portugal was giving them a valuable castle by 1128. So the idea caught on very, very quickly in the West. People clearly thought, I can't go on pilgrimage myself, but I would like to help people in the Holy Land. I want to help protect the Crusader States. I'll make a donation to the Templars and they will pray for me because they're a religious order. And when they're out there fighting, I'll be praying for them. And it's almost the same as if I was there myself. Well, obviously not quite.
• Matthew Lewis: Yeah, I was going to say, is it a way of people who couldn't or wouldn't or didn't want to go on Crusade, feeling like they were participating, they could support the Templars, which was supporting the effort in the Holy Land. And the effect of that is that they begin to acquire land all over the place in Europe.
• Helen Nicholson: Absolutely. That's what people thought it would appear because when they gave their donations, they referred to Jerusalem and the Templars who protect the Holy Sepulchre there.
• Matthew Lewis: I mean, in the game, the Templars essentially are fronted by a big multinational corporation based in Rome that is conducting all sorts of experiments to find these pieces of Eden. It sounds like that's a fairly reasonable way to view the Templars, even in the 12th century, that they were this big multinational corporation, kind of medieval Amazon. And did the Templars, as they grow and they change and they become more powerful, did they lose sight of what they were originally founded to do? They were there to help pilgrims get to Jerusalem, but as you mentioned, Jerusalem is eventually lost. The Templars don't cease to exist because of that. Did they change? Did they alter their approach?
• Helen Nicholson: They had the problem that as people gave them donations in the West, they expected something back. So whereas the Templars' regulations indicate that they're supposed to be giving a third of the income, or at least the profit, from each of the properties they have in the West to headquarters, be it in Jerusalem or later in Acre. In fact, they had their patrons saying, well, we've given you all this land, but we want, for example, grandmother wants someone to look after her in her old age. She wants to come and live as a hermit in your estate. And so then the Templars would have to support her. She brings somebody with her, but it's a bit like going into a care home. After a certain point, your money's gone. And some people seem to have bought these care packages for their families. So clearly that is going to be a drain on resources. But the order itself, the brothers continue to talk about, we are defenders of the Holy Church, we are defenders of the Christians. They were still running boats out to the Holy Land so they could take pilgrims as far as Acre into the Christian territories there. They just couldn't necessarily get you to Jerusalem anymore. And of course, they were also fighting in the Iberian Peninsula in the frontier against the Muslims in Spain and Portugal. So they still had got a front in the West, as well as continuing to attempt to recover territory in the East. The problem from their point of view would be, is it, can we recover Jerusalem and keep it? They did try and get it back. They did get it back briefly in the 1240s, then it was captured off them again. Is it better just to try and maintain a foothold here and negotiate with the Muslims and negotiate terms so that pilgrims can visit Jerusalem? Be realistic about this. Perhaps we can see we aren't going to be able to hold Jerusalem permanently. So where do we go from here? Are we just trying to hold our line, maintain a presence, knowing we can't actually recover land and hold onto it? And they get criticised for that in the West, people who think they ought to be able to recover Jerusalem. These, of course, are the armchair critics that every general has always had to compete with.
• Matthew Lewis: It seems to be, if that was their driving force, I mean, Richard I goes to the Holy Land and almost gets to Jerusalem and he seems determined not to make an attempt on Jerusalem. Do you think he's being pushed by people like the Templars who desperately do want to recover Jerusalem because that's so core to what they exist for?
• Helen Nicholson: Yes, Richard the Lionheart had to balance the different advice he was getting. So the Templars and Hospitallers, in fact, advised him not to go and attack Jerusalem at this point because they wanted more support from the West before they made an attempt on Jerusalem. They were afraid that if Richard captured Jerusalem, everybody would then go home, as they had after the First Crusade, and they wouldn't have the manpower left to hold it. So they wanted to keep the Crusade going a bit longer while they made other key conquests around, such as Egypt and securing supply lines from Egypt, Beirut in the North, so they get that valuable port back, and then they make an attempt on Jerusalem because what they didn't know at that point was that they didn't actually have that much time because Richard was going to be recalled to the West. On the other hand, if they had hugged around a bit longer and Richard hadn't gone back, Saladin died in 1193 and they might then have been able to make an attempt on the city. So there was a lot of criticism for not making that attempt. There is one account which says, if only we'd known, in fact, we could have captured Jerusalem at that point because Saladin's troops were in confusion and Saladin wasn't able to hold on to his troops and they were all wanting to disperse their various homes and we could have captured Jerusalem and held it. But, you know, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
• Matthew Lewis: Yeah. And as the Crusader kind of grip on the Holy Land slips further and further away from Jerusalem, what does the Knight Templar order look like? I mean, imagine if they're acquiring all of this land and money in Europe, it becomes a big administrative machine to run that in Europe.
• Helen Nicholson: In Europe, they are not only running their estates, they've also got houses in many towns and cities which they're letting out. So they have now become landlords, evil landlords charging rent to innocent young people as we have so many problems with that now. They move money across Europe because they wanted to get money to the Holy Land, of course. So they effectively set up a banking system. They're not quite like modern banks, the French historian Alain Demurger has argued, because they don't lend money out to other places and collect interest on that as modern banks do. Except that there are occasionally indications that they might've been doing that. So they're quite like a modern bank and they would do money transfers for you. But then that's another level of administration. They have to keep money records not only for their own money, but for everybody else's. And then because they were very trusted as knights and monks, regarded as people of great integrity, they get dragged into administration for lords and kings and the Pope as well. All these things, and yet they want to recapture Jerusalem. So they were still insisting that that was their purpose, that they wanted to do that. And that was why people were joining the Order. Although there do seem to be a few people that joined because they thought it could be a very good career in the royal service. And the best way of getting into royal service was to join the Templars. And then you could get into royal service by the back door, as it were.
• Matthew Lewis: And just how, at their height, just how powerful were the Templars?
• Helen Nicholson: Well, they had the Pope's ear, whether or not they listened to what the Pope told them. Because a Templar was the Pope's cubicularis. It's one of the officials of his bedchamber. And the Hospitallers has had one too. So they could always get the Pope's ear. Then they have roles for monarchs. So in England and in Aragon, they help to run the treasury. They have a backup deposit system where the king leaves some of his valuables. And in France, they actually ran the royal treasury for a long time. So yes, the king can't do without them. They also act as ambassadors, not just for kings, but also for lords because they're very trusted. And because they are also military people, they're regarded as being the sort of people that doesn't get attacked and thrown off their horses and have all their letters stolen from them. And because they're religious, they may be exempt from some of the problems that other secular ambassadors had. Their members are always traveling around Europe collecting money. So some people accuse them of carrying secret messages for monarchs. So in all these respects, they are extremely influential. They seem to be quite popular landlords, in fact, despite my comments of earlier, because they have so many exemptions, not only from the Pope, but also from bishops and kings and landlords. But they don't have to pay taxes on this and they don't have to do this due or that due because all the money is going to the Holy Land. If you're their tenant, you may also be able to claim these exemptions. Now, technically you shouldn't be able to, but the Templars sort of blurred this. Oh, they're our tenants, so they count as our brotherhood so they can have some of the benefits of the brotherhood. And likewise, the Templars were allowed to exonerate their own members from excommunication. And they again appear to have pushed this on a little bit further than it was supposed to go and started exonerating their servants and their tenants as well. So quite nice landlords.And their tenants used to put Templars crosses on their houses to show up. We're Templars. The bishop comes on his visitation and says, no you're not, and take that cross down. And they don't.
• Matthew Lewis: But those are incredible powers to be acquiring. The ability to quash someone's excommunication was meant to rest kind of just really with the Pope.
• Helen Nicholson: Yes, but they are Christ's army and they will tell you that although they answer to the Pope, but sometimes the Pope doesn't know his own mind. We know Christ's mind because we pray every day and we shed our blood on the battlefield. And you warriors all know that warriors are much closer to God than monks are because monks just sit in their monasteries and all they do is pray. They don't know what it's like out there on the battlefield.
• Matthew Lewis: The Templars are the best of both worlds. To what extent do you think the Templars became victims of their own success, both in the sense that we know they will fall eventually, but also they don't ever recover Jerusalem, which is their stated aim. Is that because they get distracted and sidetracked and they become victims of their own success to the point where they're too busy to do what they were originally founded to do?
• Helen Nicholson: They were victims of their own success and that people expect so much of them. They think they should just able to walk across the Mamluks, who are actually the greatest warriors on the planet at this point, and walk straight into Jerusalem. That is not going to happen. But it was not the Templars fault the Mamluks seized control in Egypt during the 1250s and finally by 1260. And this was a very well led professional military force, and the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the leaders of the Crusaders states don’t really have an answer to the Mamluks powerful military machine. So, in fact once the Mamluks had united most of what had been the Crusader states in the various desperate Muslims states in the Middle East under their banner it was not going to be easy for anyone to dislodge them. The Mongols tried, the Mongol Ilkhanates invaded the area and they did make conquests, but they don’t stay. So, at the time of the Crusader states, reduced to just Cyprus in 1291, they–the Christians in Cyrpus can make bridgeheads. The Templars held Arwad Island, it wasn’t just Ruad Island, off Tortosa, for a few years but they can’t hold it permanently. The Mamluks come up with their navy from Egypt, because the Mamluks haven’t been an effective navy since Saladin a century earlier, and they just wipe the Templars off Ruad and that’s that. In that respect, no matter how powerful the Templars had been, they couldn’t stand against the Mamluks. The whole of Christian Europe wasn’t in a position to be able to hold onto territory in the Holy Land, apart from the fact that the rulers of Christian Europe all had other things on their minds. So, although the people still wanted Jerusalem, etcetera, kings had other battles to fight.
• Matthew Lewis: Can we think of the Templars then as being too inflexible? Did they just not find a way to adapt to the new challenges that the Crusades were bringing?
• Helen Nicholson: We could argue they were too inflexible. They would tell us actually they were still trying to do what they could, that they were supporting the Pope’s attempts to ban trade with the Muslims for example, stop people selling the latest in great weaponry to the Muslims. They could trade in that in the Eastern Mediterranean. So, there was an expedition. The commander of the Auvergne, Humbert Blanc, had organized an expedition around the Eastern Mediterranean in the Summer of 1306 to try and stop these traders. And it would appear that he going to organize another one, which didn’t happen, all for reasons of the trial. They were still trying to organize a Crusade, but there weas different opinions over what the Crusade should be because they were up against the Mamluks as well as the people of the second House of Leon said the early 1270s. It’s like a little dog kept barking at a big one, we’re never going to get anywhere against the Mamluks and the Mongols. So the Templars were attempting to organize a big expedition but it wasn’t getting anywhere. What could they have done? They could have done like the Hospitallers and just paced themselves with one island, roads, and used that as a bridgehead. Not that the Hospitallers ever got back to the mainland. They could have gone fought somewhere else entirely, the Teutonic Order had gone to Northeastern Europe, the Baltics, and they were fighting the Lithuanians who were still pagans. So that perhaps they should have done that in the Iberian Peninsula. And there's a hint in a writer in Austria in about 1316 who suggests that they might have been going to do that. This is 30 years after they lost Acre, so he might be making it up either. What else could they have done? They could have done that. I think to myself that more likely is they would continue to try and regain territory in the Eastern Mediterranean, find that they weren't getting anywhere, and they might have ended up like some of the other orders and eventually just being amalgamated into government service and becoming a military branch of the King of England's government, King of France's government, the King of Aragon, Portugal, and Castile's government, rather than being an independent force.
• Matthew Lewis: It's fascinating. I mean, it sounds to me a lot like the makers of Assassin's Creed picked a really good foil for the Assassins, an incredibly powerful movement. We can see talk of them being involved in secrets and secret activity, which is exactly what the game plays on. It sounds like the Templars were the perfect pick for Assassin's Creed.
• Helen Nicholson: And one of the advantages of using the Templars is that they were abolished. Therefore, you're not treading on anybody's toes.
• Matthew Lewis: Or at least, supposedly. Next time on Assassins vs Templars, it's the grandmaster of the evil Templars, Robert de Sable, as Dan Snow is joined by the expert on the man himself, Peter Edbury. Make sure you're following the Echoes of History podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts from so you don't miss a single episode and you can listen to the rest of the series there too. This series is a special collaboration between Ubisoft and History Hit with post-production undertaken by Paradiso Media.

Robert de Sable

• Woman’s Voice: History Hit and Assassin's Creed presents Assassins vs. Templars. Real histories of the secret orders.
• Dan Snow: Welcome to Episode 4 of Assassins vs Templars, I'm Dan Snow and this is a special collaboration between History Hit and Ubisoft with the masterminds behind the Assassin's Creed games. This series explores the real history behind the secret societies that inspired the Assassin's Creed franchise. The Assassins themselves and the Templars. So in every episode we're diving deep into the Crusades. We're talking about everything from the myths of the Grail to discovering the real people who inspired the key characters of the game. In this episode it's Robert de Sablé, one of the main antagonists from the original Assassin's Creed game. Who was he? What did he accomplish? Was he that athletic? And why do we remember him today? The man who's going to answer all those questions for us is Peter Edbury, he's an emeritus professor in the School of History at Cardiff University. Enjoy Peter, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
• Peter Edbury: Thank you, thank you for having me.
• Dan Snow: Listen, every great game needs a great evil genius. An antagonist. Assassin's Creed has got that, we've got Robert de Sablé. Tell us about this man.
• Peter Edbury: Robert de Sablé was from Western France—Sablé itself is sort of more or less halfway between Le Mans and Angers, and it was an important lordship—And he was the hereditary lord of Sablé. Came to inherit the place around about 1160. Now the point is that it had been a very, very important place because it was right on the border. It was the Marcher lordship between Angers and Maine, and so his ancestors were border lords. And that meant they had to be pretty tough. By the time Robert came along, it wasn't a border lordship any longer because a whole lot had got subsumed into the so-called Angevin Empire—The lands in France ruled by the King of England, Henry II —So he wasn't a border lord, but he was one of the awkward squad. He was one of the people who made life difficult for Henry. His own son rebelled, Robert joined in.
• Dan Snow: That's the problem with the Plantagenet family. The sons all went a bit rogue, didn't they?
• Peter Edbury: Yes, it was a pretty volatile situation. What happened in Robert's case was that when Henry's elder son, the young Henry, died in 1183 left Robert a bit high and dry.
• Dan Snow: He picked the wrong side.
• Peter Edbury: Yeah, and he managed to re-ingratiate himself. Which means that by the time the Third Crusade was called he was back in the King's good books. The other thing that Robert has to do before he can set off on Crusade is to make his peace with various abbots and so on whose property the abbots claimed he'd been infringing. There's quite a lot of sorting out of lawsuits and so on going on, because Robert wants to be squeaky clean if we're going on Crusade.
• Dan Snow: And is going on Crusade quite a good way of rehabilitating your reputation?
• Peter Edbury: In his case, he obviously was already rehabilitated, because of the responsibilities he was given. Basically what happens is that the Crusade is called in 1187. Robert as lord, Henry II, is a bit sort of sound-offish about this. But then he dies and Henry's son, Richard the Lionheart, Richard I, takes the lead. And Richard entrusts Robert with a group of others as his naval commanders. His job is to bring the ships round from England, through the Straits of Gibraltar en route for the Holy Land, basically.
• Dan Snow: And so Robert has the warlike instincts of his forebears. He's a warrior.
• Peter Edbury: Yes, he's a warrior, and he joined the king in Sicily. He's known to have been personally involved in negotiations for the king of Sicily. They sailed on to Cyprus, which Richard conquered. We know Robert was with him at the time because he turns up in a document, and then they reach the Holy Land.
• Dan Snow: So Robert de Sablé is the main antagonist in Assassin's Creed. Before he even goes on Crusade, is there any sense he's more or less villainous than anyone else in this period?
• Peter Edbury: No, no, he's also quite a sort of typical type of these people.
• Dan Snow: And is he involved with the Templars, the religious order?
• Peter Edbury: Not specifically, but, and this is the interesting thing. His great-uncle had been the master of the Temple. There's a man called Robert of Craon, whose dates are something like 1136-49. Robert Craon, incidentally, is not very far from Sablé, on that sort of border between Anjou and Maine. And Robert had been the master of the Temple at a time when the Templars got an enormous amount of their endowments. Templars are very wealthy.
• Dan Snow: So Robert de Sablé does have a lineage that involves the Templars. He's at King Richard's side, so he's a senior Crusader. So as far as the game's concerned, they have picked out a kind of a senior Crusader. But having landed in the Holy Land, what's he gone and doing? When does he fire up his association with the Templars?
• Peter Edbury: Well, when they reach the Holy Land, there are two things going on. The chief thing is that they're actually setting about besieging the town of Acre, which is the modern-day Israeli Akko in northern Israel. It's far and away the best harbour and it's also already identified as the sort of chief commercial centre. The Christians are trying to win it back from the Muslims, they'd lost it in 1187. By 1191, when they arrive, the siege has been going on for almost two years. Richard and the King of France, who arrived a few months earlier, bring it to a very speedy conclusion. The other thing that's happened is that the previous master of the Temple was a man called Gerard of Ridefort, and he'd actually died in a skirmish during the siege of Acre back in 1189. So in other words, there has been no master of the Temple for about 18 months by the time these people get there. And what seems to have happened was that Robert joins the Order and he's immediately elected master. Now you say, that's a bit funny. Surely you would expect the master to be somebody coming up through the ranks, rather than somebody who's been parachuted in from above. But that's effectively what's happened, obviously Richard has engineered this, I don't think there's any doubt about that. So he's Richard's protégé, he's the master of the Temple. Interestingly, the other great military order, the Hospitallers, another of Richard's cronies is the master at the same time, So Richard's got a full house, basically.
• Dan Snow: So Assassins Creed are right to say that Robert de Sablé was one of the most senior crusaders. He's obviously very close to Richard and he's now running this military order in the Holy Land.
• Peter Edbury: Yes, he's in charge. Now what's happened is that the Templars have suffered very, very serious losses. All the Templars captured at Battle of Hattin back in 1187 have been slaughtered. Other losses are quite considerable. The probability is that there are not so many Templars around and more to the point, there are not very many experienced Templars. People who are experienced with the local warfare, experienced with the local conditions.
• Dan Snow: But Robert isn't either, he's fought alone in France.
• Peter Edbury: Exactly, yes, Robert's another one. Now presumably what happens is that those Templars who are survivors are very much sort of looking to give sort of day-to-day advice as to what you can do. I mean after all, what are you going to do if you're running an army? Well you've got to find food, you've got to arrange transport, you've got to have horses. I mean one of the big problems you see with going on crusade is that horses don't like going on boats, especially little boats. If you bring your horse with you from the west on crusade, I think it takes quite a number of days before it's in a fit state to bear the weight of your body on its back after it's been cooped up in the hold of some ship. So I mean there's all sorts of problems, and these are the sort of practical problems that you have to get. I noticed from Assassin's Creed that he was obviously an extraordinarily athletic man who sort of did all sorts of running across roofs of houses and so on. There's no portrait of Robert, we assume he was active as a warrior. But whether he was a man of great physical prowess or not, we've no idea.
• Dan Snow: In the Assassin's Creed game he is portrayed as someone very very important. Can you see his impact on the course of the crusade?
• Peter Edbury: Well he is important simply because he's the commander of this particular military unit. It has to be said though that as Master of Templars he doesn't leave very many traces. He's not Master for very long, say he's elected in the summer of 1191. Dies probably in September 1193, although we can't rule out the possibility he may actually have died in September 1192. So he's not around for very long, and there are very very little documentation. What we do know is that the Templars were very much involved in Richard's campaign. After they captured Acre, Richard set off into what is now moved south into southern Palestine. What he's obviously trying to do initially is advance on Jerusalem. And the way to do that is to secure the coastal centres of Jaffa (present day Tel Aviv), Ashkelon, which had been a major fortress. And that's Richard's priority. Now to get there the army obviously has to march down the coastal road, and on the way the army comes under very heavy harassment from Muslim mounted archers. And how do you organise an army that's being attacked in this way? You want to move forward, you're being harassed and you have to get a strict, vigorous, well disciplined formation and you need people who know what they're doing to guard the rest of the troops and it's the military orders who take the lead. And the Hospitallers and Templars between them act as the vanguard and the rearguard of the army. And their job is to try and keep the Muslim mounted archers at bay, keep them out of range if possible.
• Dan Snow: It's a constant combat.
• Peter Edbury: It is a constant combat. And obviously Robert is going to be a key person in this. So the army sets off down the coast from Akko–from Acre–towards Tel Aviv–towards Jaffa. And when they get to a place called Arsuf, which is not very far north of Jaffa, they actually engage the Muslims in battle. And this is really the one occasion when Richard is involved in what's anything resembling a pitched battle with the Muslims, and the Christians come off pretty well. There are losses, but on the whole they've carried the day. The problem is that the Muslim mounted archers are back harassing them only a few days later. so in that sense it wasn't the sort of big knockout blow that they may have hoped for. When they get there, there's quite a lot of work needing to be done to get the fortress back in a sort of viable position and so on. And then there's the question of advancing on Jerusalem. And the military orders, again, presumably those members of the military orders who have local knowledge or experience say, now look, it's not going to work. Jerusalem itself is not actually particularly strongly defended by the Muslims. But you take Jerusalem, you're going to have very, very long supply lines and it will be very easy for the Muslims to bring up a much larger force and kick you out and destroy you. So basically cut your losses and don't bother. That, of course, didn't go down terribly well with the rank and file. But Richard could see the point. Now, say the Templars, Hospitallers, they're the people who are giving this advice. It's the local knowledge.
• Dan Snow: So you think Robert de Sablé, even though he was also from out of town, he was probably channeling that advice.
• Peter Edbury: He'll be endorsing what his guys tell him, basically. He'll be happy with that. So that's the first thing that happens, so they help with this march, they give the advice and that's more or less it. Now, there are two other things that they do. One is, when at the end of the Crusade, in September 1192, Richard decides to go home. He decides he wants to take the shortcut.
• Dan Snow: He would regret that.
• Peter Edbury: Well, exactly. He decides he'll go through the territory of his great enemy, the Duke of Austria, through Germany, heading for Normandy. And the way he decides to do it is he'll go in the company of some Templars, himself disguised as a Templar and they get found out that he's betrayed or recognised. We're not quite sure, the sources will tell you different stories, different details.
• Dan Snow: And he ends up in prison.
• Peter Edbury: And he ends up in prison and he is held to ransom and everything is sort of delayed. And it's terribly scandalous that they should do this to a Crusader, or at least that's the view the English took.
• Dan Snow: And Robert de Sablé was with him or he goes back a different way?
• Peter Edbury: No, almost certainly not. I think Robert must have stayed in the East. But the other thing that Robert's involved with concerns Cyprus. Richard conquered Cyprus en route for the Holy Land. Cyprus was not held by the Muslims, it was held by the Christian Greeks, in the person of a man called Isaac Doukas Komnenos who was basically a member of the Byzantine imperial family who'd gone rogue and effectively usurped power in Cyprus. Styled himself Emperor, but I don't know whether you can really call yourself Emperor of Cyprus because it's not a very big place really. Richard conquered it. This is in the summer of 1192, just before he reaches the Holy Land. And Richard of course realises right from the start, if the Crusade is going to work he must have plenty of ready cash up front to pay his troops and to hire additional mercenaries. That's what he wants to do. And Cyprus, yes, there'll be money floating around. They grab as much loose cash as they can from Cyprus and then, after a short interval, we don't know quite how long, Richard says, look, I will sell it to the Templars and they can produce some more cash up front. So he sells the island of Cyprus for an absolute bargain price of 100,000 bezants. Now the bezants is the Arabic dinar. So they're gold coins. And the Templars, of course, under the exigencies of the Third Crusade and all the problems, can't actually put 100,000 pounds worth of gold into Richard's sticky fingers on the nail. So they say, look, you can have 40,000 and we'll get the rest from the luckless Cypriots who we will now ruthlessly exploit. So what they do is they send a fairly small force of Templars to take charge of the island. Now consider the implications, had this worked Cyprus would have become a Templar island. It would have been rather like a later history of Hospitalers in Rhodes And then much later on in Malta. It would have been their own sovereign state. It's what the Teutonic Knights had in Prussia, the Templars would have had in Cyprus. And it is actually quite, the might of being, is really quite stupendous really. Well now, you say, what happens? Well, what happens is fairly predictable. The Cypriots don't like the Templars very much, but they also realise there aren't very many of them and so they stage an attack. And the Templars get holed up in a fortress in Nicosia. Now the sources say it's not very well defended. Now that can mean one of two things. It may mean that physically the fortress wasn't up to march. in other words, the walls weren't very strong. Or it could mean that the fortress was actually quite strong, but there weren't enough food and drink in it to keep the garrison there for more than a few days. But either way, the Templars are shut up in there, they try and negotiate their way out but the local Cypriots aren't having none of it. And so the Templars decide that the only thing to do is literally to cut their way out and so they sally forth, killing anyone who gets in the way. And the slaughter sounds to have been pretty appalling.
• Dan Snow: Do we think Robert was with them then?
• Peter Edbury: No, in fact he wasn't. It was quite clear he wasn’t. It was a man called Armand Bouchart, and Armand Bouchart, those of you who are Assassin Creed aficionados is another character who turns up in that story. The sources, again, are a little bit ambivalent. There are various versions of the account. One version says they did awfully well. Another one sort of rather laments the fact that the slaughter was so extensive and so largely unnecessary. So they escape from their fortress and Robert has to go back to Richard and say, look, sorry, chum, it's not working we're going to just have to give you the island back. We don't have the resources to do this. We can't cope. So in other words, Robert has failed.
• Dan Snow: Robert has failed. Richard has also failed to a certain extent. They've failed to capture Jerusalem and there's a peace treaty, isn't there? Well, there's an agreement between Saladin, the Muslim commander, and King Richard. In Assassin's Creed it's got Robert kind of negotiating this treaty himself, but that's not true, is it?
• Peter Edbury: Not as far as I know. There's no doubt at all that he would have been in on Richard's counsels when he was doing it. But whether he was actually physically involved (18:18) With talking to the Muslims, I don't know.
• Dan Snow: And as you point out, he dies in the Holy Land as well. So we don't think he dies in a dramatic duel, like he does in Assassin's Creed.
• Peter Edbury: No, as far as we know, he died in his bed.
• Dan Snow: But we should point out that lots of people…
• Peter Edbury: Died of disease.
• Dan Snow: It was hard campaigning as well.
• Peter Edbury: Yeah, he's a man of mature years. By this time he's probably in his 50s. Not very many of these people live beyond 60.
• Dan Snow: Just finishing up, I guess what Assassin's Creed portrays the Grand Master of the Templars as a sort of a hugely significant figure, as powerful as kings. Do you think that was realistic? Or does it depend on the health of the Templars at the time? Whoever was in the office?
• Peter Edbury: Well, they were powerful. But what happens is that after the Third Crusade is over they get much more powerful. Basically what happens is that a lot of the territory that the Christians lose they never get back, or they never get back securely. On the other hand, the Templars have still got all their estates in the West and their recruiting grounds in the West. So they've still got their wealth, and essentially what happens is the Templars and the sister order the Hospitallers are more important in the years that follow the Third Crusade than they had been previously. Before 1187, you have this rather odd situation developed. The king relies on the military orders because he needs their manpower, he needs their wealth. But on the other hand he doesn't control them, he doesn't rule them. Military orders are only answerable to the Pope, and that means that although the military orders, both Templars and Hospitallers, are an enormous asset their troops are not under direct royal control. And the other thing that needs to be said is that in the 12th century, at least three of the Masters are men rather like Robert, Who'd been jobbed in, not by the king of England as a Crusader, but by the kings of Jerusalem. Men who had been royal officials, who'd been high in the king's service and then suddenly appear As the Master of the orders. So again it looks as if the sort of manoeuvre that Richard had tried, had previously been played successfully by the various kings of Jerusalem.
• Dan Snow: Peter, thank you very much for coming on this podcast.
• Peter Edbury: Well thank you very much.
• Dan Snow: Thank you for listening. Next time on Assassins vs Templars, Matt Lewis is talking to Nicholas Morton About Richard I and Edward I. How one of them may have hired the Assassins, and how the other got on the wrong side of them. Make sure you're following the Echoes of History podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss it and you can listen to the rest of the series. You've been listening to a special collaboration Between History Hit and Ubisoft with post production done by Paradiso Media.