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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

345

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.

The Assassins & The Crusaders

• 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. 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 begins with Assassins and Templars racing to gather the Pieces of Eden in the fiery heat of the Near East amidst brutal religious upheavals. We're all Desmond Miles now, and we've found our Animus. We've found a team of the best historians working in their fields who will unlock the memories of the past for us. They'll lead us through the vaults of their secrets and introduce us to some of the 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 Dr. Nicholas Morton, an Associate Professor at Nottingham Trent University and a specialist in the medieval Near East. Nick's written several books, most recently The Mongol Storm, which considers the arrival of the Mongol Empire amidst the Crusades. And he's joining me today to talk about the Assassins and their relationship with Richard I, Lord Edward, and the various Crusader states. Thank you very much for joining us, Nick.
• Nicholas Morton: Great to be on the show.
• Matthew Lewis: The Crusader states and the Assassin sect sort of overlap each other in history. They run parallel to each other, pretty much. What was the relationship like between them? Did they view themselves as enemies? Were they divided on Christian versus Muslim lines?
• Nicholas Morton: One of the most interesting dimensions to the history of the relationship between the Crusader states and the Assassins and it goes back a little bit before the Crusaders arrived, because about 20, 30 years before the Crusaders, the entire Near East region is invaded by a group of people called the Seljuk Turks, and their invasions start in the year 1000, and they reach the northern Syrian region where the Crusaders themselves conduct their invasions about 20 or so years before the Crusaders. And the point is that the Seljuk Turks conquer the entire area, but that, of course, includes many different groups, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish, and it can't be guaranteed when the Crusaders arrive that these people will feel a sense of shared purpose and common feeling with the Seljuk Turks, who are themselves invaders. So you've got many groups, such as the Bedouin, and yes, the Assassins, who exist in a sort of amidst space. They don't necessarily feel aligned to the Seljuk Turks, but neither do they feel aligned to the Crusaders either, and that's what makes the relationship really so interesting in that they're trying to plot a route to their own survival amidst these two invaders coming in from different directions.
• Matthew Lewis: So the Assassins don't necessarily feel any loyalty to fellow Muslims, they're looking for a way for the Assassins to survive.
• Nicholas Morton: Well, in some cases they do, but the Seljuk Turks themselves are Sunni Muslims, or they become Sunni Muslims at least during the course of the 12th century. The Assassins, or Nizaris, they are Shia Muslims, and they're intensively persecuted by the Seljuk Turks, and so often they feel a greater sense of threat from the Seljuk Turks than they do from the Crusaders themselves.
• Matthew Lewis: What was the geopolitical setup of the Holy Land throughout these Crusades? It changes, I guess, but essentially we know we have Crusader states and we know we have Muslims, but it seems like the Assassins are a third power at play there.
• Nicholas Morton: Sure. Okay, so let's set the scene a little bit. Only a couple of decades before the arrival of the First Crusade, much of the Near East has been conquered by the Seljuk Turks, and they are a new influence in the region. They're not a long-standing or historic community in the area, and they have now come to rule a very broad population consisting of many Christian and Muslim groups, and many different ethnicities as well, whether that's Arabs or Kurds or other peoples across the entire area. And then, about 20 or so years after the Seljuk Turks reached the Near East, you have the advent of the First Crusade. As the First Crusaders set out from Western Christendom with the earliest waves in 1096, they became a major presence in Northern Syria in 1097 onwards, so only 20 or so years after the Seljuk Turks, and they conquered Antioch in Northern Syria. They were invited to defend the city of Edessa, and they then took power in Edessa soon afterwards, and then their armies advanced south, conducting a very brutal siege and overthrow of Jerusalem. Now, the conquests of these three cities, Edessa, Antioch, and Jerusalem, laid the foundation for what would become the Crusader States, essentially European countries in the Near East, in modern money, if you like. But this raises all sorts of questions for everyone else. The Seljuk Turks vigorously resisted the arrival of the First Crusaders, because, naturally, they threatened their control over the entire region. But at this point, at least, the Crusaders defeated field army after field army, sent against them from the various Seljuk Turkish governors from the area, cities like Aleppo, Damascus, and Mosul. And so, for a time, at least, it looks as if Seljuk authority is hovering in the balance. And that raises lots of questions for the various local communities who make up the bulk of the population. And the questions here would include things like, who's going to win? Irrespective of who you want to win, who is going to win? And then, of course, who do you prefer? Because it can't be taken for granted that the Crusaders would be viewed in a more hostile way than the Seljuk Turks. They're both invaders, and neither of them have been particularly gentle in taking control. And so some pick the era after the First Crusaders, their moment to rebel against the Seljuk Turks. Others align themselves more with the Seljuk Turks. But the Nizaris, or the Assassins, which is the nickname that people gave to many years later, they were one of these groups. Who should they support? Because they're intensively persecuted by the Seljuk Turks. In fact, when the Seljuk, a new sultan, came into power in 1105, he identified the Nizaris, or Assassins, as his number one opponent. Didn't even mention the Crusaders. In fact, it's something of a sort of Eurocentric conceit that the Crusaders are the biggest show in town. They're not. There's a lot of things going on in the Near East. At this point, at least, the Seljuks see the Nizaris, the Assassins, as being a very, very serious threat. So that raises a question for them, as it does for many, many other groups across the Near East. Who's going to win? Who should they support? Whose side are they on? And crucially, how do they survive against these two millstones of these two powers who are rivaling one another for control over many areas of the Near East?
• Matthew Lewis: And I guess if the Seljuks are persecuting the Assassins in particular, there might be a degree to which the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and perhaps the Assassins start to view the Crusaders as potential allies.
• Nicholas Morton: That's seen in many cases in the Near East. When we talk to people about the Crusades, they'll not nearly always sort of caption it as, oh, it's a Christian versus Muslim war. And there is an element of that. But there's lots of situations where you have Christians and Muslims on both sides. There's more reasons than just religion for conflict in the Near East. There's trade. There's population movements. There's the rivalries between families and ethnicities. It's a very complex map, which makes the whole thing incredibly intricate, but also very fascinating at the same time.
• Matthew Lewis: The balance of power swings backwards and forwards throughout the Crusades. And we join in the game in the Third Crusade, when the First Crusade's successful for the Christians, the Second Crusade a failure for the Christians, success for the Muslims. The Third Crusade is underway. Do we see the relationship between the Crusader states and the Assassins changing as that balance shifts?
• Nicholas Morton: Yes, absolutely. So the main thing is that perhaps the biggest presence of the assassins is in Aleppo, certainly in an urban area in northern Syria. Aleppo and northern Syria, where they have a large community. And the various Turkic rulers of Aleppo have to work out how they're going to orientate themselves vis-à-vis the Assassins. There's a strong pressure from other Seljuk Turkish rulers in the region to persecute them, but they've got to manage the fact there's a large population there too. And so eventually they're expelled. And so many Nizaris or assassins go down to Damascus, and there too, they are placed under a great deal of pressure. And so they begin to open talks with the Crusader states in the 1120s. The idea being that they will hand over the lands that they own in return for lands within the Crusader states. And then in the midst of a big crusade in 1129, because of fears that the Nizaris are collaborating or cooperating with the Crusaders, the authorities in Damascus conduct a massacre of Nizaris or Assassins in Damascus. And that then very much brings the assassins into the Crusader states, looking for sanctuary. And they eventually create a sort of small territory for themselves in northern Syria. And occasionally the Crusader states fight on the same side as the Assassins. Occasionally they fight against one another. It's not a particularly amicable relationship. Often the neighbouring landowners, who are often the Templars and Hospitallers, want tribute from the Assassins. But nonetheless, there are times where they work together. There are times when they fight together. But one of the most interesting details is that along the boundaries of Assassin territory, they've got boundary stones. And on the Crusader or Templar side of the border, those boundary stones are marked by a cross. And on the assassin's side, they're marked by a dagger, just to make the point that this is where the territory changes.
• Matthew Lewis: And we can really see iconography there that we would associate with those groups today, probably.
• Nicholas Morton: Sure. But like I said, it is a very uneven relationship. The Templars frequently want tribute from the Assassins. And one particularly well-known episode is where the assassins want to form a formal alliance with the largest of the Crusader states, called the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And the King of Jerusalem is very keen to have that alliance because he's looking for additional allies he can work with in the region. But the Templars don't want that alliance because they want to maintain their tribute payments from the Assassins. And so when the Assassins come down to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, they send their envoys down to finalise that treaty. It's actually the Templars who ambush the Assassins' deputation and assassinate them, if you like. So they then ruin that treaty. King Amalric of Jerusalem is furious. It ruins the relations at that moment. But relations go up and down for many decades, all the way through that period. Yes.
• Matthew Lewis: That's an interesting moment though, because the central conceit of Assassin's Creed is the Assassins who represent the desire to find peace through free will versus the Templars who want peace through order. And it places them ideologically at odds. And it sounds like the Templars had a different relationship to the Assassins than the rest of the Crusader states perhaps did.
• Nicholas Morton: Yeah, it's fairly simple. They want tribute from them. The Assassins, it's very difficult to gauge the assassins' motives and what they're after because we have so little written by them. Although judging by their actions, what they really want is to be left alone. They're aware that they're very small in number. And so they compensate for that by conducting these very high-profile assassinations, which means that people are often terrified of them. I mean, Saladin famously spent his nights on many campaigns sleeping in a wheeled wooden tower, which could be locked from the inside because he was so concerned that he might be assassinated. And the Assassins seem to have tried possibly around twice to assassinate Saladin, but they never got to him. But they could create huge amounts of fear. And that's how they protected their community because rulers didn't want to cause trouble with them because of that very danger.
• Matthew Lewis: Did that give them a power that went beyond their size and their territorial sort of reach? Did that fear of them and their ability to get to people make them more powerful than they might have otherwise been?
• Nicholas Morton: In most cases, yes. But so we're told by one Crusader called John de Joinville, not with the Templars. And the reason for that is the Templars, yeah, the Templars had a Templar Master, but the Templar Master ruled alongside a ruling council called the Central Chapter. And the assassins knew that if they were to kill a member of the Central Chapter or to kill the Templar Master, the remainder of the chapter would just continue to rule. So wherever you killed a sultan or a queen or a king, that would cause a crisis of state for most territories. It wouldn't actually affect the Templars because they're ruled by a group of 13. So unless you can kill all of them simultaneously, it's not going to work.
• Matthew Lewis: The original Assassin's Creed game picks up in the 1190s during the Third Crusade when Richard I, Richard the Lionheart, is in the Holy Land and he's a character in the game. But Richard I eventually gets into trouble because of alleged connections to the Assassins. Do we know whether he was on good terms with the Assassins? I mean, he's accused of hiring them to kill somebody. Is that likely? Do we know how true that is?
• Nicholas Morton: Oh, well, this is one of the great whodunits of the medieval period. The person who was killed was called Conrad of Montferrat. And Conrad was significant because he felt that he should be king of the remnants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And he wasn't the person Richard backed. Richard wanted another person to be king of Jerusalem. He wanted the existing king of Jerusalem, a man called Guy of Lusignan, to be king of Jerusalem. And so there had been an ongoing controversy over which of these people, Guy or Conrad, would become king. Now, that matter had just been settled before Conrad was assassinated with the decision going to Conrad. And so you could say, well, maybe it was Richard. Maybe he was angry at the fact that Conrad had become king of Jerusalem. But on the other hand, that's also not likely because Richard had been receiving reports of trouble in England while he's away. He knows he's got to get back. And whilst Conrad wouldn't have been his choice, Conrad's choice would have raised the prospect of stabilising things so that he could leave. So did Richard do it? It's difficult to say. Did he have a relationship with the Assassins? We don't have evidence of that, but it's not impossible either. It's very hard to say. The other possible culprits are Saladin or another member of the crusading elite who's out there, or perhaps the Assassins themselves. Famously, the Duke of Austria sent envoys to the Assassins basically to ask, why did you kill Conrad? And they came back saying, we killed Conrad for our own reasons. But actually, it's thought that that letter which reports that reply may have been forged. So again, another layer of complexity to the question of who did it.
• Matthew Lewis: And interestingly, Conrad's father, William, is a character in the game as well. He's one of the targets of Altaïr for assassination. So we see a direct parallel there between the game and real life. In the game, you're trying to assassinate William. In real life, it's his son who is actually killed by the Assassins. How does this end up getting Richard I into trouble?
• Nicholas Morton: It gets him into trouble because Richard has plenty of enemies, particularly within the crusader camp. The crusading army is a combination of factions from across Western Christendom who share very little except the fact that they are broadly seeking to try and conquer Jerusalem. Aside from that, they have longstanding political differences and disagreements, and many of them are not well disposed towards Richard. So when the prospect of blaming Richard for that assassination comes up, naturally, many will seize onto it, even if it's still not clear whether he did or he didn't or exactly what happened there.
• Matthew Lewis: Most of the crusades feel a lot like everyone taking their personal problems from Europe on holiday to the Near East in the sun and fighting it out amongst themselves as much as fighting Muslims there.
• Nicholas Morton: That's very true. And there's plenty of quarrels and arguments. And Richard, on his way home, was imprisoned by Leopold of Austria. And it seems very likely the reason for that was the on-crusade. When the city of Acre was conquered by the crusading forces, Leopold put his banner above the city walls, which is often taken as the symbol of the victor. And Richard said, well, no, you have all the victor by what about the fall of the city. He pulled down Leopold's banner and up goes his own. And Leopold was furious. So yes, there's that ongoing tension and controversy between crusading leaders could play out both in the crusader states and indeed in Western Christendom.
• Matthew Lewis: But am I right that the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat was kind of the official reason that Richard was held on his way home?
• Nicholas Morton: It's difficult to say what Leopold's actual motives were, that he probably had several things running through his mind. But certainly that accusation would have been a powerful one.
• Matthew Lewis: And your most recent book deals with the arrival of the Mongols in the Near East in the midst of all of this crusade. How does their arrival on the scene change the dynamic? Does it have an effect on the Templars and the Assassins in particular?
• Nicholas Morton: Yeah, so the Assassins had a very troubled relationship with the Mongols. Initially, when the Mongols started their invasions into the Near East, they began in the 1220s, that's when the Mongols had reached the region south of the Caspian. And at this point, it's not clear whether the Assassins saw the Mongols as a threat or even a potential ally. The Assassins tend to get persecuted quite a lot in this period. And so they may have seen the Mongols as a possible way of avoiding that. And there's even one report that says that they actually wrote to the Mongols inviting them in. Having said that, when the Mongols did finally arrive in force, in the Assassins' own territories in the 1250s, they besieged the Assassins' many strongholds. These are their strongholds in Persia. The Assassins have got two main clusters of territory, one in Syria, one in Persia. They besieged these citadels in Persia, or modern-day Iran, and then were very brutal in their overthrow of those strongholds. So the Mongols very much set themselves up as opponents to the Assassins. Again, this seems to have been a reaction, at least in part, to fears the Assassins would try and kill the great Khan or some leading members of the Mongol imperial family. So the Mongols overthrew the Assassins in the 1250s very brutally, although some of the sieges of the Assassins' castles lasted for well over a decade. And then the Mongols advanced across the Tigris, across the Euphrates, into northern Syria, into the region where you've got the Crusader States, as well as various other Muslim territories as well. And the main Mongol army besieged Aleppo in the north, which is only, I don't know, maybe 40 or 50 miles from the Assassins' own territory. And at this point, that raises the question of, well, what are the Mongols going to do next? Are they going to try and overrun the Assassins' territories in Syria, just as they had their territories in Persia? And certainly, when a flying column was sent out from the siege of Aleppo down towards Damascus by the Mongol leader, a man called Hulegu, he instructed his lieutenant leading that army, a man called Kitbuqa, to destroy the Assassins' lands on his journey south, or at least as part of that campaign. But he didn't do it. He went to Damascus, he secured Damascus' overthrow, and perhaps he was planning on doing it later. We'll never know, because at that point, the Mongol army was defeated by an Egyptian army led by the Mamluk dynasty, who was in charge of Egypt at this time. And so we don't know whether Kitbuqa would have sought to overthrow the Assassins immediately after that or not. What we can say with confidence is that the Assassins were acutely aware of the threat the Mongols posed from that point, if not before. And so they were very much looking for ways of supporting those who could resist the Mongols in later years.
• Matthew Lewis: So the scenery is changing all of the time and I think we have this view of the Assassins being quite, I guess, mercenary is the word. They're up for hire for anybody. But it sounds like they also had their own political agenda and their own considerations of who their friends or enemies were at any given time as well.
• Nicholas Morton: I haven't come across examples of the Assassins sort of murdering on order. If you pay a certain amount of money, you get a certain number of assassinations. But they do seem to have been open to political influence. So if there was a sort of a regional overlord who they felt that they ought to keep in favour with, then yes, they could well conduct assassinations on behalf of that regional overlord. And that does become clear in the 13th century, particularly after the Mongols become such an imminent threat. Because the only power in the region that shows any real ability to defeat the Mongols is the Mamluk Empire of Egypt and Syria. And so we have examples soon after the Mongols arrive in northern Syria in the early 1260s of the Assassins actually looking for Mamluk favour. Because they realise the Mamluks are their best chance of surviving. And so they begin to look to work with the Mamluks. And certainly in later years, a lot of the Mamluks' enemies, particularly Mongol opponents, do either suffer attempted assassinations or very real assassinations. There are a smaller number also of attempted assassinations against leaders in the Crusader States as well, which are sort of very, very thin territories by this stage, clinging onto the coast of the Levantine region.
• Matthew Lewis: And a lot of the gameplay in Assassin's Creed revolves around being sneaky, assassinating people from the shadows, surprise attacks, all of that kind of thing. What do we actually know about Assassin tactics? Is that the way they operated?
• Nicholas Morton: There's one tactic which seems to work particularly well and which we do tend to have fairly well recorded. And that tactic, in essence, is that the Assassins would disguise themselves as someone who might be of service to the leader they want to assassinate. And then to offer themselves for service, to get into that ruler's employ, and then just to wait until the order comes to strike. The idea being that that ruler will learn to trust them, will eventually lower their guard, and then they've got them where they want them. One very famous episode of this is where the Assassins sent an envoy to see Saladin. And the envoy said, look, I want to speak to you, Saladin, just you by yourself. And Saladin said, look, I'm not going to get rid of my entire entourage. I'll keep two bodyguards with me, but then we can talk in at least relative privacy. And so the Assassin's envoy said, okay, that's fine, we can do that. So they had their meeting. And the Assassin's envoy then went to that meeting and then addressed Saladin's two bodyguards and said, if I asked either of you to kill Saladin, would you do it? They both said yes, because they were both, if you like, sleeper agents for the Assassins. And this really worried Saladin. And the Assassins could do the same thing with leaders in the Crusader States. And so in, I think it's 1270, the Lord of Montfort, Lord of Tyre, a city on the coastline in the north of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, he employed two warriors as light cavalry in his army of his lordship. And he learned to trust them. And consequently, they became quite close. And it was at that moment that they then chose to strike. So this is quite common. Get close to the ruler you're after, wait for them to drop their guard, and then you've got them.
• Matthew Lewis: And did the Assassins tend to work in public or in private? Did they want people to know that they had killed someone? Or were they more keen that that person died in secret?
• Nicholas Morton: I'm not aware of the Assassins seeking to perform what could be described as sort of show killings, killing someone as a public spectacle. There are a few times that people were murdered in public places. The ruler of Mosul was killed in Damascus in a very sort of public act. But I suspect that in many cases, the Assassins want at least some chance of getting away. And the chances of doing that in public are much less than if you can do it in private and get out before the alarm is raised. So often it's in private or semi-private. It's often in those sorts of… I suppose the modern equivalent would be not if you were going to drive to a public event. You wouldn't be killed at home. You wouldn't be killed in the car. Perhaps when you're getting out of the car and going into the venue. It's those sorts of crossover moments. That's when you're vulnerable. And often that's when the Assassins struck. But essentially they wanted to do it when their target guard was down.
• Matthew Lewis: And I guess part of that bit about having sleeper agents there is that they can then pick those moments. They can find the moments to strike when the target is most vulnerable.
• Nicholas Morton: Sure. The non-lethal alternative, which is just, as with the Saladin example I gave you, of just making it very clear just how vulnerable you are if they want to get you, which of course gives political leverage without even having to kill anyone.
• Matthew Lewis: Yeah, which is in itself a very different form of power, I guess.
• Nicholas Morton: Sure. But much of this, this is the basic power relationship here, is it's a small community which is often intensively persecuted trying to find ways of exerting political influence, defending itself whilst recognising its limitations in terms of total population numbers, I suppose.
• Matthew Lewis: And there's another interesting incident that we can talk about. So in 1190s, Richard I gets kind of wrapped up with the idea that he may have engaged the Assassins to kill Conrad of Montferrat. And that causes trouble for him because of his proximity to the Assassins. 80 years later, we have Lord Edward, who would soon become King Edward I of England, also in the Holy Land on Crusade. And he becomes the target of an assassination attempt by the Assassins. What do we know about how that attempt played out?
• Nicholas Morton: So very similar to many of the others, really. It seems as if this person, the Assassin, offered himself for service with Edward and his entourage. He grew close to Edward. And on this occasion, I think it was in Edward's bedchamber, he waited till he'd got Edward alone. And then tried to stab him when he was unawares. But he's Edward I, and I don't know, whatever you think of Edward I, no one disputes that he was an excellent warrior. And so not an easy person to catch as unaware. So it seems as if the Assassin did draw blood. But Edward got to him before he could strike a mortal wound. And of course, as soon as Edward had held this person, the alarm was raised. And then the room was flooded with soldiers and the Assassin was killed. So the assassination attempt was a failure. But it's a very similar approach to many of the others the Assassins tried. And there's various stories about this. It seems as if Edward's brother was pretty quickly on the scene. There is one story from a much, much later period that his wife, Eleanor of Castile, sucked poison from the wound. Because the idea being the blade may have been poisoned. In fact, that doesn't seem to have been the case. But it's one of the stories told about the incident.
• Matthew Lewis: It's a great medieval romantic tale to add on to it. And so how do we know that the attack on Lord Edward was by the Assassins? Do they claim credit for it?
• Nicholas Morton: That's a complicated question. We know that an assassination attempt occurred. But there is a temptation when studying Near Eastern history to assign every assassination to the Assassins because they're well known for that. People could murder one another for all sorts of reasons and different factions could do that. So we can never be quite sure. And certainly there are other groups who may have conducted the assassination. And it may not have been as simple as it's being the Mamluk Sultan commissioning it. May have been one of the regional governors instead. It's difficult to be sure. All we can say is that because the assassination attempt itself had many of the hallmarks of the typical approaches the Assassins used previously to assassinate. Disguising himself as one of Edward's followers, waiting for a moment of when Edward's guard was dropped and then conducting the act. That would be fairly standard for the Assassins. But that's no guarantee. And so it's always one of these sorts of grey area questions which of course would have strengthened the Assassins' hand at the time. People can never be quite sure who it was they were up against.
• Matthew Lewis: And I guess to some extent if they develop a known tactic it becomes repeatable by someone else who could make it look like an attempt by the Assassins.
• Nicholas Morton: Yep, absolutely. And so once again there are question marks over these sorts of things. But of course the Assassins, their whole purpose is to live in the shadows and to play with those grey areas. So that whole grey area would work in their favour.
• Matthew Lewis: And does Edward make much of the assassination attempt himself? I guess surviving an assassination attempt would have been a mark of prestige for him. It shows how brave and how strong he was.
• Nicholas Morton: Quite possibly. Certainly the incident became very well known in Western Christendom soon afterwards. And you have various sort of songs and elaborations and reinterpretations told of the story in later years. Yes, absolutely.
• Matthew Lewis: And do we know why the Assassins may have gone after Edward I? Or does that remain a mystery?
• Nicholas Morton: That's not clear. I mean Edward's crusade has occasionally been billed as this sort of epic contest, as it were. The crusaders coming in, the Muslim powers trying to defeat this crusade. In fact, it wasn't. Edward's army was not large. The papacy had hoped to raise a big army and hadn't. Edward arrived with a fairly small crusading force. He conducted a couple of very, very limited campaigns. And they were so limited that actually the Mamluk Sultan mocked them simply because they weren't making any difference to the status quo whatsoever. And so in a sense, I'm rather surprised that Edward was targeted, not because he was an enemy to the Mamluk Sultan, who could then, of course, leverage support from the Assassins, but because geopolitically, he was fairly insignificant by this stage. One suggestion that has been made is that the Mamluk Sultan wanted a treaty with the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which Edward opposed. So this may have been a way of making sure that treaty happened. But the thing that surprises me most about the assassination is that it happened at all, because quite honestly, by this stage, the Kingdom of Jerusalem is such a minor player in the affairs of the Near East. The big players are the Mongols and the Mamluks, and they're facing off along the line of the River Euphrates. Kingdom of Jerusalem's hardly got any military leverage at all by this stage.
• Matthew Lewis: Could it have been an effort just to finish off the crusader kingdoms? (34:38) I mean, they don't last too much longer after this anyway.
• Nicholas Morton: They don't, and that would make sense. Although to be honest, Edward wasn't billed to be going home fairly soon after this anyway. It may have been a show of strength, though, you're right.
• Matthew Lewis: We know that in that moment, Edward's assassin was captured and was killed at the scene. But what would generally happen to an Assassin if their attempt failed?
• Nicholas Morton: Well, if an assassination attempt failed, the Assassin would either get away or more likely they wouldn't, in which case the Assassin specifically would be killed. But it's actually quite rare to hear of repercussions against the Assassin's territorial holdings. Once they had the protection of the Mamluk Sultanate, essentially that gave them a fair degree of protection anyway. There was a case in 1213 when the assassins killed the son of one of the rulers of the Crusader states. And following that, there was a campaign directly against the Assassin's strongholds as a repercussion of that. But often because the Assassins conduct their assassinations for their patron, as it were, the person who has a fair degree of control over them, normally it's the patron who gets blamed rather than them themselves.
• Matthew Lewis: It seems like the core message here is if you go to the Holy Lands on Crusade and someone offers to be of service and seems like a really useful, helpful chap, probably don't take him into your service.
• Nicholas Morton: Well, unless you're very confident in your relationship with the Assassins, certainly.
• Matthew Lewis: Thank you very much for joining us today, Nick, to run through all of that. And a big reminder to people to look out Nick's book, The Mongol Storm, which is available in all good bookstores everywhere. Thank you very much, Nick.
• Nicholas Morton: Thank you so much.
• Matthew Lewis: Join us again next time on Assassins vs Templars when I'm joined by Dr. Juliet Wood to talk about the Templars, the Grail and the mythology that surrounds 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 an episode in this fascinating series. This series is a special collaboration between Ubisoft and History Hit with post-production undertaken by Paradiso Media.