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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.^[1]

Echoes of History transcripts

Assassins vs Templars

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.

The Templars & The Holy Grail

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. We're all Desmond Miles now and we've found our Animus. A team of the best historians working in their fields will unlock the memories of the past for us, 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 folklorist Juliette Wood to talk about the Templars and the Holy Grail to pick apart where this myth came from and how it might relate to Assassin's Creed. Thank you very much for joining us today, Juliette.
Juliette Wood: You are most welcome.
Matthew Lewis: It's very good to have you here. So I guess the first question around the Templars. In the game, they're kind of wrapped in this myth of the pieces of Eden which is not dissimilar to the idea of the Holy Grail which is something I think the Templars have become connected with over the centuries following their existence. But why do you think the Templars are so embedded in myth and mystery within the collective consciousness?
Juliette Wood: It's because they were repressed under very unusual circumstances and because of the repression, they seemed very glamorous, much more glamorous than they were when they were actually Templars, it has to be said. So you have a kind of perfect, not precisely vacuum, but a perfect sort of ambiguity to do all sorts of things with. And of course, that's exactly what's happened to the Templars.
Matthew Lewis: And what do you think? Is it about their story in particular that inspires myth that kind of attracted that thing? Is it just the way that they fell or is there something about their existence too?
Juliette Wood: I think it's something about their existence, warrior knights going and defending the Holy Land. However historically odd that may seem, certainly in terms of a narrative, is very, very dramatic because it fits very well into any number of folklore and mythology tropes. So here you have these men and they seem, because they're together, because they're fighting, and then because of the odd way in which they were suppressed, they seem somehow to attract our attention. We want to know more.
Matthew Lewis: We feel like there must be a story there that we're not seeing.
Juliette Wood: We are convinced there is a story there that we are not seeing. This is part of the problem, I think.
Matthew Lewis: But also part of the room that gives us all the space to do these kinds of things with them.
Juliette Wood: Oh, absolutely. They're a perfect trope for things like fantasy and fantasy games. I mean, you know, if they didn't exist, someone would have invented them. Fortunately, in this case, we actually have something that did exist that we can turn into all sorts of things.
Matthew Lewis: Fabulous. We always have to be careful, I think, of blurring the lines, though, between history and the fictional elements of them.
Juliette Wood: This is a problem. And as I say, for someone in my position, so I do a lot of popular culture, I do a lot of folklore, I'm constantly saying that there is a difference between a cognitive history, the events that actually happened, and how we would like them to have happened. And as I say, if you're in the realm of fantasy, that's wonderful. But if you're trying to straddle fantasy and history, you're probably going to fall down a hole.
Matthew Lewis: And I guess from a folklore point of view, it's interesting to think about how people like to remember these things, how we build stories around these things, even if we can be aware that it's not the truth. How we try to remember things as a collective is interesting, I think.
Juliette Wood: Well, it is, because, of course, the thing with narratives, which I think are very, very special, is that they follow rules, and they end. So you have this nice, neat, little, included world that you can play around in. When you become lost in it and decide that somehow the narrative is more real than the real, then there can be problems. But it's just such fun to play with. And, of course, we've been doing it, literally, in this case, since the dawn of time. I mean, narratives are something… We narrate our lives, we narrate our adventures, and then we have these sort of mythic folklore narratives as well.
Matthew Lewis: And if we move on to the idea of the Holy Grail, so in the game, as I mentioned, they have the Pieces of Eden, which is described as a relic of a long-forgotten civilization said to possess godlike powers, which isn't all that dissimilar to the Holy Grail. And I think about 21st-century depictions, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code kind of ties the Templars and the Grail together. But what was the Grail to medieval people, both physically and spiritually? What did they think it was?
Juliette Wood: They would have known that the Grail was the cup from the Last Supper. They would have known it as one of the relics of the Passion. It was probably less interesting to medieval people than it is to us, because the idea of going to Eucharist was something that really kind of develops in the middle of the Middle Ages, about the 12th, 13th century. It wasn't all that common. Much more popular would have been the relics of the Holy Cross, for example. But you do have this context. Now, if you want to think what possibly did medieval people think about it, I think the best way, actually, is to look at Malory, who includes in his version of the Arthurian legend, which is one of the last medieval versions, end of the 15th century, this notion of the Grail and the Eucharist and this mass that the knights attend and this whole business of sort of questing after some sort of Eucharistic object. If you actually look earlier in the Grail romances, the theological aspect of the Grail really isn't there, even in the ones that say this is the cup of the Last Supper. It's really something magical and mysterious. And you are gifted in being one of the guardians of the Grail. And curiously enough, it's that earlier non-theological thing that survives into the link between the Templar and the Grail, rather than Malory's sort of lay understanding of what the Grail meant.
Matthew Lewis: Fascinating. And were there many competing ideas around of what the Grail was and what it represented, or did people have a fairly defined view of it?
Juliette Wood: They had a fairly defined view of it as part of the Passion, as the cup that was used at the Last Supper when Christ instituted the Eucharist, the Mass, and what we think of as Communion, basically. So there wasn't a lot of problem with it then, partly because it wasn't as common taking Communion as it is now. So I think that wasn't the problem. Within the romances, the Grail had different meanings and different forms, but there are very specific, about half a dozen or so, sort of stories about the Grail.
Matthew Lewis: So in the game, we see Templars questing for the pieces of Eden. In Malory and writing like that, we see Arthur's Knights questing for the Holy Grail. Do we see people actively searching for the Holy Grail throughout history?
Juliette Wood: Not actively searching, but there is a 7th century reference to someone who went to the Holy Land and says he saw, he doesn't call it the Grail, saw the cup of the Last Supper, and he describes it as a silver object. There are a couple of references to it, but there's no sense that people went out looking for it. There are two objects which are brought back from the Crusades. Now I think one has to think of the context of the Crusades, which basically Europe, let's be blunt about it, lost. And therefore the idea that you could go and see the relics in the Holy Land, well, you couldn't. So suddenly an awful lot of these relics started appearing in Europe, and a lot of the legends come around it. And there's one about a Genoese, Guglielmo Embriaco, who brings back the Sacro Catino, which is not the Grail, but it's the dish that the apostles sort of had the paschal lamb in. And it's supposed to be made of emerald, and in fact it's glass, and it becomes part of the Genoese notion of what our history was.
Matthew Lewis: And how then do the stories of the Templars and the Holy Grail become entwined? Is there a definite origin to the connection, or is it just something we see emerging slowly?
Juliette Wood: There's a definite origin, not an absolutely clear origin, but you can see the period and the circumstances in which it's developing. And it's basically the very end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th as part of the reaction against the Enlightenment, the idea that really life is not all that rational. There are sort of spiritual wells of things. And in particular, there was a reaction, the sort of conservative forces, particularly in Catholic countries, really were a bit afraid of this new rationalism, which seems secular and atheist and all sorts of things. So what you found is people sort of looking at the past and creating what we would call medievalism, an interpretation of the past which basically said, no, sorry, rationalism would be dispersed if only we could find some sort of sacred object. And then not only if only we could find some sort of sacred object, but somebody is hiding this sacred object, trying to prevent us finding it. And, of course, the Templars come into this, not immediately directly, but through the Masons, because the Masons were a secular organization, and therefore there was certain antagonism. And so the Masons, with their passwords and their rituals, suddenly had a secret tradition, and suddenly they were in contact with the Templars, who are supposed to be agnostic. Again agnosticism, being this kind of mysterious, not so much separate religion, but a version of Christianity. So it's slightly complicated in that it's a reaction to rationalism. It kind of drags first the Masons and then the Templars and then the Gnostics. And kind of once you make that connection, you're away, basically, in conspiracy theories.
Matthew Lewis: Interesting, so you've got a whole lot of rabbit holes to start diving down as soon as you start making that connection.
Juliette Wood: You do, you do. It's not straightforward, but it's very clear with a period. And it's about the beginning of the 19th century. In fact, I can almost give you a date, about 1818, a man named Hammer-Purgstall, who was an Austrian Orientalist, published this book in which he showed, in the medieval world, all of these sort of images of Templar idols. It was completely subjective, and absolutely not the way any modern medievalist would look at it. But it really struck a chord, sort of saying, these people are hiding something. They're conspiring against us. They're conspiring against the government and the church.
Matthew Lewis: So this is very definitely not a connection that the Templars would have recognised in their day. This is something that's kind of pressed onto them much later.
Juliette Wood: The Templars were long gone by this time. They were a military order. They were not an intellectual order. There wouldn't be a lot of scholars who knew Latin or the sophisticated works of the day. They just weren't that. But of course, if you decide that history is just a kind of surface mirage, hiding the truth, then it doesn't actually matter that the Templars weren't intellectuals or they didn't have ships that could sail the Atlantic Ocean or various things. In fact, oddly enough, the fact that the facts don't match the fantasy is almost seen as proof of the fantasy, and it makes it very hard to engage in this.
Matthew Lewis: And I guess another critical part of the story within the game is that the Templars continue to exist as this kind of shady organisation. As you mentioned then, perhaps linked to the Masons, all of that kind of thing, they run big corporations. How do you feel about that? Is there any kind of element of truth to the idea that this secret organisation might still exist? I mean, it's a secret, so we don't know if it's a good secret organisation, I guess.
Juliette Wood: This is it. Basically, I'd say, well, there's no proof. But of course, if you're a conspiracy theorist, having an academic say there is no proof is basically a reaffirmation of what you thought all along, that everybody is lying to you, except those who share the secret. So it's one of these things where there's almost no way of crossing over unless you accept that this is a fantasy game that we're playing. And it's a wonderful fantasy. One of the things that I find very interesting and attractive is that the Templars are opposed by the Assassins. Well, the Assassins are the Hashashin, who were just as negatively regarded in the Middle Ages. So here you have two groups, both of which attract terrible reputations, completely undeserved, it has to be said. And here they are sort of working through this wonderful complex fantasy game.
Matthew Lewis: And they both, I think, have that element of mystery to them that nobody really knows what they were about, or people guess and try and push ideas on them that may or may not be true. So again, we're doing that essentially with Assassin's Creed, aren't we? We're building a narrative and a world around these groups because there's the mystery.
Juliette Wood: Absolutely. You kind of take this idea that there are two groups who are mysterious, one good, one bad, and you go from there. And there are all sorts of things you can follow. You can look for these objects. I have to say, the pieces of Eden remind me very much of the treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Celtic treasures, which include a bowl, a magic bowl, which some people say is the origin of the grail. So all of these kind of bits of culture, and interestingly, cross-culture as well, come together. And it says something about the way we structure stories. We like to structure stories with a purpose somehow, and a purpose that can be completed. I have to say, in the medieval text, the grail is found. Several knights find it, not just one. And then, of course, it then disappears at the end, whereas our modern notion is the grail is always something that we're searching for. It's always disappearing round the corner, up a staircase, into the shadows, whatever, depending on what bit of the fantasy you're in.
Matthew Lewis: Why do you think we do that with stories like the grail? We imagine that there is some secret organisation hiding information from us. Instead of thinking it was lost or it is somewhere, we just haven't found it, why do we want to construct this idea of a conspiracy around it?
Juliette Wood: We love secrets. We particularly like to think, right, I can find the secrets. I can solve the clues in a way that academics can't. I actually, I can sympathise with this, even though I don't buy into the conspiracies. I know reading things like Umberto Eco, one of the things that intrigues me is that as I read it, I think, ah, I know what literary work he got that through. So it's kind of reading something and finding clues and feeling very satisfied that you've done that is, I think, really universal. And I think this is what the conspiracy theory is. It's kind of we are not part of the establishment, but we can find out more than they can. And of course, that's very, I think, seductive is the word I would use for that, quite frankly.
Matthew Lewis: I think things like Dan Brown's writing, which his Da Vinci Code plays into a lot of these theories that we're talking about today. Part of his trick is that he makes you as a reader feel quite clever. You feel like you're getting under the skin of the conspiracy. He's so clever at leading you through that narrative, making you feel like you're the clever one who's solving things. Stuff like the Rosslyn Chapel, we don't know anything about that, but he can construct a story that makes it look like this is hiding great stories of the Grail.
Juliette Wood: Actually, we know a lot about the Rosslyn Chapel and the background to this. It's just that he sort of ignores that. And here is this very, very fascinating imagery, which plays into our ideas of what the medieval world was like. Although, in fact, it's not what the medieval world was like, essentially. And, of course, once you see sort of these mysterious things and, you know, the apprentice, the apprentice pillar, which is probably a pillar name for someone called Prentice, which is so much less interesting, isn't it? And as I say, it's wonderful. I find it very interesting as a medievalist who is old enough to have started studying the medieval period when this kind of fantasy was, well, we all enjoyed it, but nobody took it seriously. Whereas now, the medieval courses I teach, and I'm by no means the only one, always have an element of medievalism in it. And, of course, I think, well, this is really a way to hook students into this stuff. And then, you know, you can show them just how wonderful the medieval material is as compared to some of this modern stuff. So I can see a real change in how we kind of look at the medieval period.
Matthew Lewis: Is that helpful to you as a teacher, to lure people in in that kind of way?
Juliette Wood: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it may simply be that I just happen to like fantasies. And so I feel, look, I can share my enthusiasm for this stuff. And I've always liked fantasies. Whereas when I started doing medieval studies, and I wasn't the only one, you kept quiet about that. You kind of read it in your spare time. And my feeling is these fantasies are really, really interesting. And they really allow us to get into an unreal world and to say, what if? And you can, I know this is going to sound a bit pedantic, but you can learn about yourself doing this. I mean, this is what sort of epics were like. This is what quests were like. And as I say, you're also safe because you close the book, turn off the computer, shut your phone, whatever it is you do to finish this. So no, I think this is a really, really good way of sort of showing students that this stuff is not intimidating. It's not old-fashioned. It's not sort of passe. It really has, and again, this is a terrible cliche, it really, really can speak to us. And it can speak to anyone.
Matthew Lewis: I was just interested as well in the Celtic myths that you mentioned earlier.
Juliette Wood: It's the Tuatha Dé Danann.
Matthew Lewis: How do you think that plays into the idea of the Grail myth? Does it speak to the fact that we've always liked very much the same stories, we just translate them into new themes?
Juliette Wood: Yes, I think with the Celtic myths, with the stories of the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann, who are the fairy people, basically, they're supernatural beings. Of course, we've always been fascinated by the Celts. There's something about the way we think of ourselves. There's this fascination with the edges of our lives. So we're fascinated by the East and the Crusades, and we romanticize them. We're fascinated by the Celts. We create this notion of this kind of Celtic world. And, you know, we kind of sit in the middle of Europe, at least sort of aesthetically. And yes, we like to see the Celtic myths are like the Eastern myths. They had magic objects. The Templars are looking for magic objects in the East. So I think we try to bring these things together. And even where you can't say they're the same thing, this pattern of quest and secret and magic object, and particularly being worthy to find the magic object. And I think this is what Dan Brown plugs into by allowing his readers to think, oh, aren't I clever? I'm finding these things. You're giving them the same satisfaction or a similar satisfaction to someone who is on a quest. And I think this is the reason. And also this idea of the Templars as sort of secret and the idea of the Celts, and particularly the Druid Celts, as being a secret. You find these kind of secret organizations, none of which actually exist, nevertheless merge into one another.
Matthew Lewis: Roughed all these things on, yeah. But I guess that makes the game, you know, like a 21st century evolution of those same things. We've got a game here where we jump into the body of Altaïr, back in the Crusades, and we play out investigating and trying to find these secrets and gather these pieces together as if we're on a medieval quest. And that obviously still appeals to something in us today.
Juliette Wood: We are on a medieval quest. And as I say, this is one of the things I find fascinating about modern games, is that you can participate in an almost very realistic way. I know when I was a child, I thought of myself as going on a quest. I was quite happy to be a knight on horseback. Obviously, I would wear the beautiful medieval dresses. I combined the two. Whereas now, you can turn on the computer and create an avatar exactly the way you want it. So you can actually take it one step out of your imagination and sort of realize it on a screen. And I think that is something which is quite fascinating, even though I don't think I could manage the games particularly well.
Matthew Lewis: I reckon you could give it a go, Juliette. I can see you jumping through the streets of Jerusalem. You have.
Juliette Wood: I have. And I've kind of thought, as long as I've got someone with me to sort of say, push that button and do that way, it's okay. But I think I'd rather study the games and appreciate other people's skill than try to do it myself.
Matthew Lewis: Can you see the Assassin's Creed games as adding to that folklore tradition that we have? They're picking up similar themes and they're just building it in a slightly different way and immersing us in it in a slightly different way.
Juliette Wood: I quite frankly would regard it as a folklore phenomenon. Folklore is very dynamic. There's an old-fashioned way of thinking of it as something in the past, something ancient. But in fact, it's very dynamic. And if it isn't dynamic, it dies out. So in many ways, this is it. And a lot of the information now we get, a lot of the folklore information, comes to us through the internet, comes to us through social media. In a sense, this is our oral tradition now. So I certainly think the Assassin's Creed is kind of reformulating these things and clearly hasn't finished, unlike a lot of the fantasy books, when they come to the end, you know, the book closes. This has the ability to just keep going and going and going as long as there are people who are willing to play them and as long as there are, sort of, gamers and programmers willing to devise them.
Matthew Lewis: And as a medievalist, do you see this as a positive way for people to engage with that past tradition of folklore and storytelling and things like that? I'm kind of thinking, is it any different from when we moved from manuscripts to movable-type printed books that we're now moving to a more interactive presentation on a computer screen? Is it just the next evolution of how we tell stories?
Juliette Wood: Well, I certainly think it is. I have to say, I certainly think that having the manuscript tradition and knowing the manuscript tradition and the movable type, and in fact, knowing that this is part of an evolution rather than just the only phenomena, that, I think, is important as well. I think internet is one of several phenomena. Print and manuscript are two others. And I think sometimes it's a problem that people tend to sort of think the connections between the three of them are broken and they aren't.
Matthew Lewis: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting way to think about it because then you can stretch it back 2,000 years from the tradition of manuscripts in the mid-15th century. We get movable type and all of that suddenly changes. And that must have been fairly revolutionary to people then, and they may have sneered at that as we sometimes sneer at the internet and children playing games and things like that today. But it's actually part of the same thing.
Juliette Wood: Yes, I certainly think so. I think one has to be careful not to rate them as if they're sort of, you know, one is better than the other. They are sort of that kind of communication which was suitable for a particular period. And before manuscripts, you also, and you still continue, to have communication which is face-to-face, which is an oral exchange of information. And that, I think, is the one constant that in a sense feeds into all of these other phenomena.
Matthew Lewis: So if I was to put you on the spot, does the Holy Grail exist and will we ever find it?
Juliette Wood: No and no. I say that, I think, with a certain level of regret. But no, it doesn't exist. And no, we won't find it. But that's in a sense the least interesting thing about the story. I think if we get bogged down in, I must find an actual grail, and quite frankly in the course of my research I've come across at least eight objects that claim to be the Holy Grail. And I probably haven't looked all that closely. I could find more. But I think it's this notion, and I think, oddly enough, Wolfram von Eschenbach in writing Parzival, again in the 1300s, expresses it very well. Because he's not interested in the theological grail. He's interested in the notion of there is this magical object. And to be a guardian of this magical object is in a sense the highest calling. And that really is what happens in Parzival. Parzival finds not so much the grail, but he finds his family, who are the guardians of the grail. So it's a very personal story. And that's, oddly enough, I think picked up later on with the Templars. It's picked up by people like Rudolf Steiner, who sees the grail as an internal quest, as an initiation, as it were. And then it's picked up by the, let me be polite and say, more popular speculations on the hidden grail. So as I say, no, the grail doesn't exist. But the concept of the grail is what's important.
Matthew Lewis: And are we missing the important thing isn't finding a cup that Jesus may have once used. The important thing is the quest and what you can learn. And as you said before, more often than not discover about yourself that questing for it is the important thing rather than finding it or not finding it.
Juliette Wood: Yes. And you could see this in the medieval text as well. It's the knights have to find out certain things, answer certain questions, accomplish certain things. And then, of course, the grail in a sense presents itself. So it's achieving these sort of levels of understanding. And then the grail sort of says, well, you know, here I am basically trivializing it a bit. But I mean, that essentially is what's happening in the romances. And that essentially I think is what's happening in some of the modern grail things as well. Even if the language isn't quite as poetic or posh as the romances languages.
Matthew Lewis: And it's not a million miles away from Assassin's Creed. So Altaïr is done a quest. He's tasked with 10 assassinations. And they're trying to find these Pieces of Eden to bring them together to prevent, you know, the end of the world as they see it. So it really is just engaging with that same idea that to some extent the quest is important and what you learn on the quest.
Juliette Wood: And he's very much a grail hero in that he starts out not knowing who he is and not knowing what it is he has to do. And I mean, this is certainly the position that Percival finds himself. He doesn't realize that he's related to all of these grail people. He doesn't realize that he has a mission. He's a rather brash young man who goes crashing through the undergrowth and making all kinds of mistakes. So that kind of hero, what folklorists call the unpromising hero, which is rather a silly name for it because it's a hero with a great deal of promise. He just doesn't know it yet. It's very, very fundamental. And I have to say, I'm using the word hero and let me point out that it doesn't have to be a man.
Matthew Lewis: Absolutely.
Juliette Wood: It's just that there's this character who doesn't know quite how wonderful their potential is.
Matthew Lewis: No, you're absolutely right. I mean, we see Templar sisters and we see female Assassins in the game as well. So the game is with you on that, I think. And I guess to put you on the spot with the other side of what we're talking about, do the Templars still exist? Is there a secret organization out there pulling strings?
Juliette Wood: No, there isn't a secret organization pulling strings. They exist as a kind of society. I was introduced to a gentleman at one of these conferences who was the last Templar, but as a kind of society and priest rather than a sort of secret thing. Do the secret societies ever exist? Yeah, there were conspiracies and they didn't want to be found out, but that's not quite the same thing as secret society. But we certainly both fear the notion that there is a secret society pulling the strings. And we also want the notion that there's a secret society pulling the strings because it's not our fault.
Matthew Lewis: And just to end on, what do you think as a folklorist and a medievalist, what do you think that tells us about us today that we both fear and desperately want these things to be true?
Juliette Wood: Well, I think it simply says that we're human. This is part of the sort of human condition that certainly was expressed in the medieval period, but not just in the medieval period. You could go back farther and see the same sort of thing happening. I think what's special about the medieval period is we can still see it around us. So many of our buildings have medieval elements. Things like the Arthurian legend is very popular in children's books. So it kind of seems closer to us than, for example, the ancient past, the Greek or the Roman or the prehistoric past. And I think it's because certainly in the West, certainly in Europe, and in those countries that were sort of colonized by Europeans, you just see a lot of medieval bits and pieces because that's part of the way we kind of presented ourselves.
Matthew Lewis: Wonderful. I think it's been fascinating to position the Assassin's Creed game as almost a continuation of millennia of tradition of writing and telling stories and encasing them in these mysteries that we want to solve. It's been great to position Altaïr as a kind of grail hero who is on the same kind of quest as grail knights and things like that. It's been absolutely wonderful to pick these things apart with you. Thank you very much for joining us, Juliette, and sharing your expertise.
Juliette Wood: You are very welcome.
Matthew Lewis: Next time on Assassins vs Templars, it's Assassins’ deeds throughout history. We'll be picking apart some of the most famous and infamous assassinations and assassination attempts with John Withington. 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 there you can listen to the rest of the series too. This series is a special collaboration between Ubisoft and History Hit with post-production undertaken by Paradiso Media.

Assassins' Deeds

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. We're all Desmond Miles now and we've found our Animus, a team of the best historians working in their fields. We'll unlock the memories of the past for us. They'll 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 John Withington. John is an award-winning television broadcaster and journalist who is particularly interested in disasters, both natural and otherwise. His most recent book, Assassins’ Deeds, a history of assassination from ancient Egypt to the present day was released in 2020. Thank you very much for joining us today, John.
John Withington: Pleasure to be here.
Matthew Lewis: It's wonderful to have you. So I guess we're talking around Assassin's Creed here, Altaïr's campaign to assassinate the right people during the Third Crusade. And we think of the assassins, but they weren't the first and they certainly weren't the last either. Can you give us an idea of how early in history we can trace back the idea of assassination for political reasons?
John Withington: The first assassination I could track down was a pharaoh called Teti, an Egyptian pharaoh who died in 2333 BC. Now, we have circumstantial evidence and some written evidence. So a historian did write that he had been assassinated, but that historian was writing about 2000 years after the event. So about halfway between where we are now and when Teti died. It could be, of course, that he was drawing on sources that we've since lost. So we've got his account. There's also some circumstantial evidence, which is that a lot of senior officials from Teti's court had their memorials defaced. And this was a terrible punishment in ancient Egypt because it meant you would wander homeless through the afterlife. And if you look then in the Persian kings, between 550 and 330 BC, of 13 Persian kings, 11 were murdered. So I think it's reasonable to assume that as soon as there were people in power or authority, you had assassination. And the fact that we know about ancient Egypt and Persia is probably just to do with the fact that they had better records.
Matthew Lewis: It kind of begs the question whether there's ever not been assassinations.
John Withington: I think that my assumption would be that as soon as there was organised society with some people in power, there probably was. And I think that there was an American anthropologist who examined an Egyptian cemetery which dated back up to 14,000 years. And he found that 40% of those buried there had evidence of wounds from sharp stones. So sadly, I think the world's always been a violent place and assassinations probably always been part of that.
Matthew Lewis: Why has assassination always been a popular tactic throughout history? We see in the Crusades in particular, the Assassins, if we can still call them the Assassins, are famous for sneak attacks, for infiltrating. And if you play the game, it's all about sneaking around, diving from a high distance and assassinating someone by shock. But why has it always been popular? Does it contain this element of fear, confusion and everything else that we can add to the death of a political leader?
John Withington: Well if we go to about a thousand years before the Assassins, so around the time of Christ in the Holy Land, there were a group called the Sicarii. And they're pointed to by a lot of people as, if you want to use this terminology, the first modern terrorist group. And they were trying to resist Roman occupation. And their method was literally cloak and dagger. So they hid daggers beneath their cloaks and they liked to strike their victims at big public festivals for two reasons. One, that they felt this gave them a good chance of escaping by melting away into the crowd. But secondly, because they felt it enhanced the propaganda value of the killing. That it was more scary if the killing happened in full view of lots and lots of people.
Matthew Lewis: And I guess we see that a bit in the game as well. Some of the assassination attempts there are required to be at public events, which as you say, makes it more shocking, but also I guess increases your chances of escape, which must be in the assassin's mind. You don't necessarily want to die in the attempt if you can avoid it.
John Withington: No. You know, you obviously got in more recent times, you've got suicide bombers who plainly don't think they're going to escape. And I think if you look at the history of assassination, there's probably quite a lot of occasions, for example, the people who killed Tsar Alexander II in Russia in the 1880s, I think they probably pretty well knew there was a very slim chance that they would escape.
Matthew Lewis: To be an Assassin, you've got to be willing to accept a personal, a level of personal risk. So can we talk a little bit about what we would classify as an assassination? We have plenty of murders throughout history that we don't necessarily call an assassination. How, maybe when you were writing your book, how did you define an assassination as one that you would look at?
John Withington: Yes. So all assassinations are murders, but not all murders are assassinations. And the definition that I took was that assassination was the killing of somebody rich, powerful or famous because they were rich, powerful or famous. But I also excluded people who were already held captive by their opponents. So for example, Edward II, I wouldn't count him being assassinated, he was murdered, but he was already in the power of his opponents.
Matthew Lewis: Do you think there are categories of reasons that we might be able to divide assassinations into? So in the game, Altaïr is given 10 people he has to assassinate for specific reasons. But do they happen for, is it about revolution? Is it about specific policy? Is it about revenge, personal hatred, or a mixture of those things?
John Withington: Well, I analysed about 260 assassinations. And you're right that motives are complex. And of course, motives are often mixed. There might be a political ideology might be an element, but there might also be an element of revenge or fear in the same assassination. It's quite difficult to come to firm conclusions. But for what it's worth, of the 260 I looked at, about 127 were some sort of political ideology. In the early years in particular, dynastic ambition was very important. So rather than overthrowing a particular form of government, it was more, I'd like to run this form of government rather than the person who's running it. So there were 44 that were what I would call dynastic ambition. They, of course, were very often murders within the family because it was very often a brother, a father, a son who was doing the killing. Religion was important in 24, but anger and resentment was important in 29. There was a man called Edward the Martyr, King of England, who was killed in 978. Now, Edward the Martyr was now a saint. He was rather odd saintly material because he had a terrible temper, and he managed to annoy an awful lot of people. And he was murdered by relatives of his younger brother. And one of the motives may simply be that an awful lot of people hated him. But you talked about fear earlier, and interestingly enough, fear actually can be quite an important motive for assassination. So the Roman Emperor Volusianus was killed by his own troops in 253 AD. And that was simply because they didn't want to be led out to fight against a usurper who was trying to get his throne. They thought they'd probably lose, so they killed him instead.
Matthew Lewis: So they almost assassinated him to save their own lives. Yeah. You can almost encapsulate the entirety of human nature within that list of reasons to assassinate someone, can't you? Fear, ambition, greed, or a desire for change.
John Withington: Revenge.
Matthew Lewis: Revenge. Yeah, absolutely. So in the game, the chosen tactic is normally to assassinate by a hidden dagger. So a dagger that pops out the sleeve at the last minute by which you assassinate someone. Do we see different methods of assassination that are perhaps aimed at achieving different ends?
John Withington: Well, certainly we see that the methods of assassination change. You wouldn't be surprised about that. But one of the things that struck me was how long stabbing remained the preferred method. So for quite a long time after firearms appeared, stabbing still remained the chosen method. And it wasn't really until the 19th century that firearms took over. And even when firearms took over, it tended to be the handgun at close quarters rather than the sniper's rifle. So I suppose if we think of assassination in fiction, the book that often comes to mind is The Day of the Jackal. And of course, he is a very high quality sniper, isn't he? But actually, snipers were very, very rare. I looked, there were about 230 assassinations where I could work out, was it at close quarters? Was it at distance? And only 19 of those actually were done from distance. So yes, the firearm changed the method. But in terms of the modus operandi of the assassin, if you like, very often, it still required you to get up close and personal with the victim.
Matthew Lewis: Do you think that had much to do with the reliability of firearms? Because it took a long time for them to become anything like reliable, whereas a dagger in your hand, you know exactly what you're doing.
John Withington: I think that's almost certainly true. Yeah, I think that's almost true.
Matthew Lewis: If you're going to take the shot, you don't want to miss. If you've got a dagger, you're getting close enough to do the job properly.
John Withington: Correct.
Matthew Lewis: And can you give us a few examples of some of the assassinations that really stuck out in your mind from your research, from your books, some detail of how the assassinations took place and what they were assassinated for?
John Withington: Can I talk first about one that struck me as perhaps the weirdest of assassinations?
Matthew Lewis: Oh yes, please.
John Withington: Well, in 995, in Scotland, the succession was not arrived at by getting the eldest son of the king to take over. So what happened was that the person chosen was chosen from amongst all the male relatives, the adult male relatives from previous rulers of Scotland, from previous kings. Not having the eldest son succeed was supposed to have the advantage that you didn't get an infant taking over with all the potential disorder that could bring. The downside was you got a lot of rival claimants. And King Kenneth II of Scotland wanted to try to secure the throne for his son Malcolm to secure the succession. But there were plenty of other people who fancied becoming king, and one was a man called Constantine the Bald. And Kenneth II was out in Aberdeenshire one day, and he was accosted by a woman who goes by various names, but something like the Lady Fenella. And the Lady Fenella wouldn't be thought to be well disposed to King Kenneth because he'd had her son executed. Anyway, she went up to the king and said, look, you know, I know I was a bit cross with you about having my son executed, but fair dues. I recognize that, you know, he'd done wrong. And just to show that you don't bear any ill will to me anymore, would you come to my house? And the king was a bit iffy but she whispered in his ear, if you come to my house, I will give you the names of all the people who are plotting against you. So anyway, so the king is eventually convinced, and he rolls up to the lady's house. And on the table is this very nice statuette of a little boy. And the Lady Fenella says to the king, if you touch that statue, something really funny will happen. So the king again was a bit iffy, but he thought, well, what's the worst thing that could possibly happen? So he touched the statue and he was immediately hit by a volley of crossbow bolts, because it had been booby trapped and it had been connected to hidden crossbows all around the room. After a little while, the king's retinue a bit worried about why he hadn't come out and what was going on. So they broke in, found his body. The Lady Fenella probably sensibly made herself scarce. She ran off. They apparently cornered her at the top of a cliff above some water and she dived into the water and was killed rather than surrendering. Constantine the Bald did manage to get the throne, but then he was defeated by Malcolm, King Kenneth's son, who took over the throne and ruled for about 29 years, I think. This story may be true or maybe not, but it's a good story.
Matthew Lewis: It's a cracking story. I mean, there's an awful lot of thought gone into there, into building a statue that's rigged to connect to crossbows to try and assassinate the king.
John Withington: Yeah, I think the connecting up to the crossroads probably is quite an engineering feat, yeah. From that sort of era, well, let me try you out on something. Suppose I told you about a very senior churchman who fell out with his king and annoyed his king so greatly that while he was conducting a church service, he was murdered.
Matthew Lewis: I'm going to say Thomas Beckett.
John Withington: And that would be a very good guess. And the only thing that doesn't quite fit in the story is that Beckett was actually preparing a church service, I think, when he was killed. So actually, I'm talking about Bishop Stanislaus of Kraków, who was murdered by the Polish king, possibly even by the Polish king's own hand, certainly at his instigation. But you're absolutely right. It could, of course, be the story of Beckett. And I think that illustrates the fact that what you've got there is you've got these two very powerful institutions, the church and the state, probably the two most powerful institutions in England at that time. And every now and then, these tensions are going to boil over. And Beckett's murder, of course, he'd fallen out with the king. He'd been in exile in France for six years. Henry II managed to persuade him to come back. But when he came back, Beckett seemed completely unrepentant. He started sort of flinging around excommunications of all his enemies. He got a hero's welcome when he came back to England. And he milked that by taking the most roundabout route he could to Canterbury. So this was all irritating the king. And perhaps on Christmas Day itself, the king said words to the effect, you know, the usual formula is, isn't it? Who will rid me of this troublesome monk? Something of that kind. Was that just an understandable expression of exasperation by a man known to be hot-tempered? Or was it an instruction? Anyway, four of his knights took it to be an instruction and cornered, confronted Beckett in his cathedral and then killed him. And one of the things that Beckett's story illustrates is the law of unintended consequences. What was the effect of him being killed? Made him a martyr, made him one of the most celebrated saints in Christendom, meant that Henry couldn't push through the reforms he wanted, which was basically to make sure that clergy who had committed crimes would be tried in civil courts, not church courts, had to give that up and spent most of the rest of his life fighting civil wars with his sons.
Matthew Lewis: I have to say I'm convinced by the theory that Beckett kind of wanted to martyr himself, that he set everything up. It bears very strong resemblances to Christ taking in the Garden of Gethsemane, the way Beckett seems to stage manage that. It's like he almost stage managed his own assassination for his own reasons, which, as you say, were the unintended consequences of what Henry did. As we move on through time, do we find that there are assassinations with better records? Are there things that we have more details of that are perhaps more recent?
John Withington: Yeah, so when I was doing my statistical analysis, if you want to call it that, up to about the 19th century, I analysed virtually every assassination that I felt that I could find sufficient evidence about. By the time I got to the modern age, there were just so many that I just had to choose 100 to do. So yes, obviously, everything is much better documented, isn't it? And maybe that's allied to the thing that we were talking about with the Sicarii. Josephus, a historian writing at the time of Sicarii, said although their killings were damaging, it was the terror that those killings generated that was far more damaging. And so in the 19th century, you began to get this idea of the propaganda of the deed. So it's not that ideas create assassinations, but it's assassinations can create ideas. So this idea that the proletariat is kind of slumbering, not realising that it's oppressed. And so if we can do something like assassinate the Tsar, as happened in the 1880s, then maybe that awakens the consciousness and the proletariat will rise up.
Matthew Lewis: So rather than an assassination aimed at achieving a specific end, it's aimed at sparking something else.
John Withington: Yes, I think assassins have obviously often been disappointed. I mean, if you go right back to Julius Caesar, one of the most famous assassinations in history, I suppose, the conspirators, Brutus and Cassius, believed that if they killed Caesar, the sort of the Roman Republic was sort of somehow spontaneously kind of regenerate. And of course, that didn't happen. Instead, you got 14 years of civil war, which ended with the opposite, if you like, of the Republic with the Roman Empire being created.
Matthew Lewis: I only ask about record keeping, because in the game, one of Altair's targets, William of Montferrat, his son, Conrad of Montferrat, was actually assassinated while Richard I was in the Holy Land. And when Richard is captured on his way back to England, part of the reason for his capture is given as being behind the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat. And we get the Old Man of the Mountains, the head of the Assassins, kind of writes to the Holy Roman Emperor and says, no, Richard didn't engage me to do this. I did it off my own bat kind of thing. But we just don't have the records to understand how much of that is true, how much of it was propaganda by Richard's enemies, and how much of it might have been true. So it must be nice when you get into a time when there's a bit more record keeping, and you can see a bit more clearly what's happening.
John Withington: Yes, I think that's true. And I mean, just going back to the Assassins and their relationship with the Crusaders, you know, it's quite a striking coincidence, isn't it? That the Assassins appear about the end of the 11th century, about in the 1090s. And then 10 years later, the Crusades start. And the great historian of the Crusades, Steven Runciman, said that the presence of the assassins was enough to stop there being a coherent Muslim response to the Crusades. And of course, the majority of the people that the Assassins killed were fellow Muslims, but they were from different sects, different parts of the religion. The relationship with Crusaders is an odd one. I mean, they helped the Crusaders indirectly, because if they're killing prominent Muslims, that helps the Crusaders. But there also does appear to have been a business relationship at times, where they were prepared to take on murders on behalf of the Crusaders. And there's a famous story where they killed the King-elect of Jerusalem about the end of the 12th century. He was only about the second major Crusader figure that the assassins had killed. And so there was a big meeting, you know, to thrash it all out. What on earth's gone wrong here between the assassins and the Crusaders? And the assassins allegedly said, look, we're sorry, that was a mistake. But just to make it up to you, we will kill anybody you care to name free of charge. And of course, they were in real life very worried about the Knights Templar. You know, the Assassins saw the Knights Templar as among the most dangerous enemies they had. And there was one occasion where a delegation of envoys from the assassins had been meeting the Crusader King, and they were all butchered by the Knights Templar on their way home. And there was also the Knight Hospitaller who appeared as a similar military order. And I think the assassins ended up paying tribute to them, and also doing the odd murder on their behalf.
Matthew Lewis: It kind of plays into the reality that the game pits the assassins against the Templars. There was a real rivalry there in the Holy Land. And I think it is interesting that Nizari Assassin clan kind of mirrors the dates of the Crusader States almost exactly. It arrives just before, and it ends around about the same time. And as you say, some of the targets in the game are Muslims as well as Christians. And I think if you didn't know too much about it, that might surprise you that Muslims are actively attacking Muslims at a time when the Holy Land is under threat from Christianity. But again, that plays into the real history that quite often the Assassins were at odds with other Muslim sects rather than Christians.
John Withington: Well of course, you had a similar thing happen with Christianity, sort of 400 or 500 years later when you get the Wars of Religion and the Reformation 1517. And I think, as I mentioned, that religion became a very important factor, a very important motive for assassination. One of the impressions that did sort of come across to me is that those motivated to assassinate by religion tended to be more ruthless than those motivated by politics.
Matthew Lewis: I wonder if there's an element of believing you're securing a place in heaven.
John Withington: Quite possibly. And also maybe, particularly when, you know, heresy was such a thing and the feelings were so strong about that, maybe it's also easier to believe that your opponents are thoroughly evil and have no redeeming features.
Matthew Lewis: So I guess having terrified everybody about the fact that political assassinations of all kinds have happened for millennia, not even just centuries, are there any proven ways that someone might seek to protect themselves or foil assassination attempts? Do we see people surviving maybe more than one?
John Withington: The most consoling thing about assassinations is most attempts fail.
Matthew Lewis: That does make me feel better.
John Withington: In terms of how you protect yourself, one of the things that strikes you actually when you read back in history is how careless, by modern standards, some of the victims appear to have been. So Abraham Lincoln, the night he was assassinated, Good Friday 1865, his regular bodyguard was off on a mission somewhere else and he got a kind of stand-in bodyguard and Lincoln appears to have let the bodyguard go off for a drink and there was no bodyguard on duty when John Wilkes Booth went into his room to kill him. So bodyguards is one thing you can use. They're not foolproof. So Teti was said to have been killed by his bodyguard and he certainly reorganised security, palace security. There's no doubt that a lot of bodyguards do act with enormous courage and do help to keep safe the people they're protecting. So Benazir Bhutto, there was an assassination attempt on her in 2007. Fifty of her security guards were killed and of course she was then later assassinated herself. But bodyguards can be a danger as well, as we saw with Teti. And up to 15 Roman emperors were killed by bodyguards or by troops loyal to them. And if you come forward in time, of course, you've got Indira Gandhi who was killed in 1984 by her bodyguard. There are things, there's technology, things like armour-plated cars. Eduard Shevardnadze, when he was president of Georgia, survived an assassination attempt thanks to his armour-plated car. But they're not foolproof. There was a German industrialist called Herrhausen who was murdered by the Red Army faction, even though he's in his armour-plated car. I think Machiavelli said the best way of keeping yourself safe from assassination is to make sure all your people love you. But that may not be too easy to achieve.
Matthew Lewis: And yet we also know it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time. It's a difficult circle to square. And I guess in the game, you know, part of what players have to do is to infiltrate situations and get under the skin of people and situations. And there's a famously recorded case of Assassins going to visit Saladin. And you know, he sends away all of his bodyguards except the last two who he most trusts, at which point the Assassins say, what would you do if we asked you to kill Saladin? And they both say, we'd kill him because we're Assassins. So I guess there's an element there of always, even bodyguards, you have to be wary of who they are. And as you said, they're absolutely no guarantee and they could be your worst enemies.
John Withington: Yeah, well, there's a story that Saladin was saved from assassination because he wore a chainmail cap under his turban. And I think, as you know, the Assassins wanted to kill him and made a couple of attempts. And there was this famous episode where he was sleeping in his tent one night, awoke in the middle of the night, saw a figure creeping out of his tent, and there pinned to his pillow with a poisoned dagger was a note saying, you are in our power, and some cakes of a kind, apparently, that only the Assassins made. But I think one of the attempts on Saladin illustrates another feature of the way the Assassins operated. So when the attempt was made to stab him in the head, which was to stop his cap of chainmail, the Assassins who tried to do that had been fighting in his forces. They'd signed up for his forces and fought with great courage and considerable distinction. And he was at an event to reward them for their bravery. So this business of deep cover, because again, it was one of the assassinations they did of a crusader called Count Raymond of Tripoli. That's Tripoli in Lebanon, not in Libya. But I think the two Assassins had actually gone undercover for a long time, had even got baptized. So they were prepared to take what sounds like quite a modern tactic, doesn't it? Being, if you like, I guess, a sleeper, and of going into deep cover, being very patient, awaiting the right moment to strike.
Matthew Lewis: In Assassin's Creed, Altaïr is tasked with killing a sequence of 10 people. His aim is to get to Robert de Sablé, the leader of the Knights Templar. But he has to kind of perform these other nine to get him access to Robert de Sablé. So do we ever see a series of assassinations as a way to eliminate allies to get to the main target?
John Withington: Well, certainly you see quite a bit of what I suppose we might now call collateral damage. So the 266 assassinations I looked at, 38 involved significant collateral damage, significant other casualties. And the first crusader killed by the assassins, Raymond of Tripoli, the assassins had to kill two of his knights to get to him. Probably the biggest example of collateral damage, or one of the biggest anyway, was the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, former Prime Minister of India in 1991 by a suicide bomber. She killed 25 other people. There's a very famous story from Japan about the 47 samurai. There was a senior shogun official who ill-treated a samurai to such a degree that he committed, Harakiri–killed himself. And then that samurai's followers decided they must take revenge on this shogun official. And to get to him, they had to kill 16 of his men. They did manage to kill him, but then all 47 of them were instructed to commit Harakiri, apart from one who was spared on account of his youth.
Matthew Lewis: It's currently a famous Keanu Reeves film, 47 Samurai[sic].
John Withington: It's been filmed a number of occasions, and there are books. Yeah, it's a very, very important part of Japanese history and folklore.
Matthew Lewis: And perhaps a parallel from which the game draws the idea of having to kill this sequence of people to get to the main target. That did happen in history, we can see clear parallels. You mentioned a little bit earlier, the kind of the law of unintended consequences when assassinations take place. Do we see frequent unintended consequences? What kind of thing might they be?
John Withington: If you take what are perhaps, well, certainly three of the most famous assassinations in history, Julius Caesar, Thomas Beckett, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, all of them had unintended consequences. Now, of course, there's an argument about whether the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand actually caused the First World War. And it was indeed 39 days after his assassination that the First World War broke out. But certainly, that's one of the assassins felt, because one of the assassins said, if I'd known what our deed was going to lead to, I would have sat down on my bomb and blown myself to bits. So, I think, it was Gandalf, I think, in The Lord of the Rings, who says, they're talking about should they murder Gollum? And I think Gandalf says something like, you need to be careful about this kind of thing, because not all ends are known, even to the wise. And societies are very, very complicated things, and predicting the consequences of killing somebody, very, very hard to do. So I think unintended consequences is very, very common.
Matthew Lewis: Do we ever see examples of that being taken into account? Are people ever aware? I mean, I guess the unintended part suggests that they're not. But are people ever aware that there might be bigger, wider, deeper consequences to what they're about to do? Or do they tend to be focused on their very particular reason for wanting to assassinate someone?
John Withington: I suppose that if you've gone ahead with the assassination, you've probably had to have convinced yourself that, on balance, it's worth it. One thing I tried to do, and this is obviously highly subjective, I tried to work out whether, as it were, assassination worked. So, if the people who did the assassination had known what was going to happen, would they have been happy with it? This is obviously an extremely subjective judgment. But for what it's worth, I felt that I'd got enough information in 215 cases, and I reckoned that in 132 of those, people would have been, on the whole, happy with the outcome. In 83, they would have been unhappy. Of course, all the assassinations worked in the sense that the victim was dead.
Matthew Lewis: But interesting that over half probably worked out the way the assassins hoped or would have been happy with.
John Withington: It wouldn't be true to say that in all of those cases, it worked out exactly as they would have expected. But I felt it was kind of near enough to the objective that they would have wanted to achieve. So, I suppose that's a slightly depressing figure to set against the one that most assassination attempts fail.
Matthew Lewis: We'll stick to the most fail as our consolation from this episode, I think. But thank you very much for joining us, John. It's been an absolutely fascinating tour of assassination as a weapon and as a tool of political terror. Thank you very much for joining us.
John Withington: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Matthew Lewis: In the next episode, I'm joined by Mike Carr of the University of Edinburgh to discuss the fall of the Templars. It's our last episode, and we've saved the most pivotal moment in the Templar story to the very end. 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 there, too. This series is a special collaboration between Ubisoft and History Hit, with post-production undertaken by Paradiso Media.

The Fall of the Templars

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 upheavals. We're all Desmond Miles now, and we've found our Animus. A team of the best historians working in their fields will unlock the memories of the past for us, 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 organisations as we pit the Assassin's Creed against the Templar Order. In this episode, I'm joined by Mike Carr from the University of Edinburgh to talk all about the fall of the Templars. Thank you very much for joining us, Mike.
Mike Carr: Thank you very much for having me.
Matthew Lewis: It's great to have you on to talk about the climactic fall of the Templar Order. Can you paint a picture for us to start off with, of just how powerful and wealthy and influential the Templars were, kind of at the height of their power? When is this and just how powerful are they?
Mike Carr: Okay, I mean, there's two ways to think about this. The Templars, they're sort of an international order that have possessions all across Latin Europe but also in the Middle East as well. So in terms of their wealth and power, it's worth taking these two sort of regions together and comparing them and seeing how it all works out. So at the time of their arrest in 1307, they have very extensive possessions all across Latin Christendom, so predominantly in France, but also in Iberia, in Italy, England, places like that. And we're talking about almost a thousand different Templar estates. And these would have been sort of made up of mills and farms and things like that for sort of agricultural production, other kinds of production, which would have generated the wealth of the order. And then they also have their military side, which is sort of mostly to do with the defence of the Latin East. And probably the height of their sort of military power is a little bit earlier. So in the 12th and 13th centuries, and it's said that the Templars probably by the end of the 12th century, in terms of a sort of military context, have something like 600 knights in the Holy Land in the different Crusader states, with around 2000 other fighting men as part of the Order. So they're a considerable fighting force. I mean, it's difficult to sort of put it in context, but they form quite a considerable and important part of the armies of the Latin East and in the Crusader states. So you have this sort of two facets, you've got these extensive possessions in Western Europe, and the money that's generated by them is supporting the armies in the East and also garrisoning castles and other strongholds and things like that in the East. And in addition to that, the thing that links it together is the ships and the transport and the, I suppose, the logistical networks that stretch from Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean. So I think that hopefully paints a picture of the sort of scale and the international scope of the order, really at its height. So it's extensive territories in the West generating money for this military activity in the East. And in terms of their sort of their influence, I mean, it is partly financial because of the possessions they have in the West and the money that they're generating, and also military. So a lot of it's to do with crusading. So they're advising monarchs about crusading strategy, they're giving advice and taking part in the leadership of crusades in the East. But whether or not they have extensive influence in terms of domestic policies within Europe, I think that's more debatable. Maybe the sort of more common and sort of modern perception of the Templars are of groups that really are influential in European politics. And I think maybe that's an overstatement, but they are very important in terms of the crusades and the military activities in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Matthew Lewis: And I guess even if they're not directly involved in domestic policy, their focus on the crusades necessarily drives some domestic policies and financial policies and things like that.
Mike Carr: Exactly.
Matthew Lewis: And I guess in the game, you know, the Templars still exist and they're an organisation that are fronted by a huge multinational corporation. That seems like a fairly reasonable modern parallel for what the Templars were at their height.
Mike Carr: Yeah, exactly. And I think in some ways, there's not really many or any other medieval entity that sort of has this multinational status that the Templars do. I mean, the other military orders, I suppose, are comparable, like the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights, but the fact that they have territories that are sort of scattered throughout Europe, throughout the Mediterranean, throughout the East, and they're not sort of tied to any particular kingdom, they are sort of answerable to the papacy, they're a transnational corporation. So yeah, in many ways, that does sort of match up with our perception.
Matthew Lewis: And by the start of the 14th century, they've accumulated and acquired all of this land and property in Western Europe predominantly. How have they acquired that? Is that just people giving them land as a way of supporting the crusade without going on crusade?
Mike Carr: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's a large part of it. People, yeah, making donations, obviously monetary donations, but also, yeah, donations of land they give to the Templars, yeah, in lieu of crusading or even people who have gone on crusade, but still want to leave land and territories and houses and things like that to the Templars after they die. So yeah, they receive a lot of donations from the sort of aristocratic class in Europe, which really helps them to extend and sort of establish these territories in the West.
Matthew Lewis: It's incredible just how much they acquired from people just giving them.
Mike Carr: Yeah, exactly. I mean, they do purchase land and things like that, but it's, yeah, the sort of driving force behind this, especially in the 12th century is the donations.
Matthew Lewis: And is there a moment when we see the tide begin to turn against the Templars? Can we see a pivot moment or is this a slowly changing attitude towards them?
Mike Carr: It's a bit of both. So on the one hand, the popularity and the reputation of the Templars, it's really tied in with the fate of the Holy Land. So in the, you know, sort of up to the mid 12th century, the Templars are, you know, obviously seen as being very effective militarily and the Holy Land is, you know, things are generally going quite well. But when Saladin retakes Jerusalem in 1187, and you have this sort of decline of the Crusader states, temporarily at least, the Templars get a lot of criticism for that because their sensible aim and objective to defend the Holy Land. So when you have things going badly in the Holy Land, the Templars are blamed for that.
Matthew Lewis: And I suppose you can get all these people at home saying, I gave you loads of stuff to help.
Mike Carr: Exactly. And that's the problem for them. It's sort of Catch-22 where they have all these donations and all this money that's generating in the West. And then, yeah, therefore people are, you know, blaming them for things that are going wrong in the East. So in that sense, it's a sort of more gradual decline, and obviously in the 13th century, when things are sort of starting to look even worse in the Crusader states, again, the Templars and the Teutonic Knights and the Hospitallers, Talia merchants also are criticised for this. But having said that, I think there's also particular moments and particular events which exacerbate the situation. And I suppose the main one would be the fall of Acre in 1291. So the fall of the Crusader states. And at that point, the Templars are obviously blamed partly for this, along with some of these other people that I mentioned. But also what they're unable to do really is to change their focus and, I suppose, maintain their relevance in the post-Crusader states world. Because obviously, yeah, their raison d'etre is gone. There's no Crusader states to defend anymore. They do try and recover the Holy Land and they take part in various ventures to do this. But these are generally failures. So I think 1291 is quite an important point at which I think, yeah, the Templars sort of failed to reimagine themselves. And that leaves them open to criticism in the West.
Matthew Lewis: I was trying to think of a modern parallel, and I guess the one in the game works, a pharmaceutical company that fronts the Templars, if they're suddenly not allowed to make drugs, you have to find something else to do. And the Templars are guilty of just having no other focus, but all of this wealth that attracts attention, I guess.
Mike Carr: Exactly, yeah. And as I said before, it's this Catch-22 when you've got all this money and yeah, this sort of seeming wealth in the West and all these possessions, and then you failed in your objective and you're not really seen to be, I mean, they're spending great amount of money trying to recover the Holy Land, but it's unsuccessful. So yeah, it just leads them open to this kind of criticism. And I think an interesting comparison there is to the other military orders. So the Teutonic Knights, they're able to go to Prussia and to Northern Europe and they carve out their own territories there, and they're fighting the pagans there. The Hospitallers in 1306 embark on the conquest of Rhodes, and they're seen as taking on the Turks and also the Byzantines on the sea. So these two military orders, the other two main ones, they're able to reinvent themselves and give themselves relevance in terms of defense of the faith, however that might be conceived. Whereas the Templars, the odd ones out, they're not able to do that, unfortunately for them. And I think that, yeah, it really leaves them open to criticism.
Matthew Lewis: It makes you wonder what might've happened if Richard I had left them Cyprus and he gives them Cyprus and then takes it back, which would have been the equivalent of Rhodes, I guess, for the Hospitallers. Exactly.
Mike Carr: I mean, Cyprus is a funny one because obviously the Templars and the Hospitallers relocate to Cyprus after the fall of Acre in 1291, but the Templars fall out with the Cypriot Kings there. But yeah, I think at that point, Cyprus is seen as this really important bastion of the Latin East. And actually, yeah, if they'd kept hold of it, then that may have been very beneficial to them.
Matthew Lewis: And do we see any kind of, as their reputation is waning, do we see a kind of a propaganda campaign against the Templars? And if so, does that influence their reputation today and perhaps the way that they're portrayed in the game as this sort of slightly shadowy organization?
Mike Carr: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in terms of the propaganda campaign against them, it's pretty much led by the French King and his advisors, Philip IV of France. So it's very much a French thing and the propaganda outside of the Kingdom of France and also the French propaganda and how it's perceived outside the Kingdom is not really as effective. And I think this sort of negative view of the Templars is predominantly a French thing. So yeah, in terms of the propaganda, the kinds of things that we see in it are these accusations of heresy, along with also the Templars having money and not really doing anything with it. And in terms of the heretical accusations, they're the things that start to come up in the trial a couple of years later, a lot to do with the reception ceremony, so secretive reception ceremonies where apparently they are denying Christ, spitting on the cross, engaging in sort of inappropriate kissing with the receiver sort of on the navel, on the base of the spine and things like that. And then when they're joining the order, they're engaging in sodomy and also idol worship and things like that. So it's these kinds of heretical accusations that are starting to emerge in the French propaganda in the years before the trial. As I said before, this is spread within France. It's also, there are attempts to spread this more widely in Europe, but I mean, it's difficult to gauge popular perceptions of propaganda and impact, but it seems that it's not really believed by people outside of France in any great way. But in terms of the reputation and yeah, how it's impacted on modern views of the Templars, then absolutely, I think a lot of this idea of them being secretive and potentially heretical or engaging in occult activities and that kind of stuff, that I think very much derives from this sort of propaganda campaign that the French royal agents are embarking on in a few years before the trial.
Matthew Lewis: And I guess it's not dissimilar to what we see around the Masons and things like that as well. You know, wherever there's the potential for secrecy, people will read into that whatever they want. And if you want to destroy someone, a secret place is a good place to go.
Mike Carr: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, 100% right. And what's interesting with the Masons is they, yeah, they sort of really buy into this idea of the Templars being sort of secretive and they invent all this sort of crazy stuff to do with the Templars. But actually, the sort of propaganda is almost flipped and the negative portrayals of the Templars are almost cast in a more positive light by the Masons. So they're sort of saying, yeah, okay, the Templars are secretive, but actually, they have the secret wisdom that they're trying to protect against the papacy and the king and these authorities that are trying to persecute them. So in a way, it's taking ideas of the French propaganda, but sort of flipping it and turning it into a positive. And for the Masons themselves, they track their lineage back to the Templars. So it's sort of, yeah, they're seeing this in a far more positive light than the French propagandists were. But it's the same kind of ideas surrounding secrecy and blasphemy and things like that.
Matthew Lewis: So it sounds like the efforts to bring the Templars down were really focused in France and led by Philip IV. Why was he particularly harsh on the Templars? Why did he target them?
Mike Carr: Yeah, that's a really important question. So with Philip himself, there's a few things going on, a sort of background to the arrest in 1307 that I think need to be understood to work out why he was doing this. I mean, the first thing that's worth mentioning is that Philip has form in terms of opposing the papacy and trying to sort of assert his authority over the church. So at the turn of the 14th century, there's this big conflict between Philip IV and the Pope at the time, Boniface VIII. And this is essentially over church financing, Philip's trying to get hold of taxation of the French church. And eventually this results in Philip accusing the Pope or Philip's advisers accusing the Pope of similar crimes to what the Templars accused of. So idol worship, consorting with demons, sodomy, blasphemy, all sorts of trumped up heretical accusations. And eventually this results in Philip sending one of his advisers, Guillaume de Nogaret, with a small army to Anagni, where the Pope is based at the time, to basically arrest him and bring him back to France to stand trial for these accusations. And actually what happens is that the French army sort of rough up the Pope. The Pope actually escapes, but he dies a few weeks later. So the French and Philip IV have confronted the papacy, accused the Pope of heretical accusations similar to the Templars and actually resulted in the Pope's death. And afterwards, the years after this, the accusations against Boniface are written up and expanded on by the French royal court. And they are put to successive new popes and the sort of pressure is put on the popes to allow the French to try their predecessor, Boniface VIII, for heresy. So there's this big cloud that's cast over the papacy during the trial of the French and Philip IV basically trying to exert his power over the Pope. So that's the first thing. And obviously the Templars, as a military religious order, they're answering to the papacy. They've lost their main protector and the papacy is unable to stand up against Philip. So that's the first thing that allows Philip to go after the Templars. And the second thing, probably more important, is finance. So when Philip becomes king, he inherits a lot of debt from his father. His father had died on a crusade against the Aragonese in 1285. And there's lots of debt from that. Philip's also engaged in wars against England and later on against Flanders as well, which are very expensive. And then to add to this, there's problems with the amount of silver circulating in Europe. And this is causing economic difficulties within the Kingdom of France. And Philip is essentially debasing the coinage in France. He debased it six times in the two years running up to the trial, just to give you an idea of the problems there. And actually there's riots in Paris about the economic problems in December of 1306, so a few months before the Templars are arrested. And what Philip actually does to try and alleviate this is he seizes the property of Lombard communities a couple of times in France and then also of the Jews in 1306. And he actually expels about 100,000 Jews from France in order to get their money and to get their silver, especially so he can sort out his own coinage. So there's a pattern here where this guy has massive debts, real problems with the coinage. He needs precious metals, he needs money in order to sort this out, to sort out the economy of his kingdom.
Matthew Lewis: I think what you can see there, though, is quite a populist, what we might call today a populist agenda, that he's targeting people who are easy to target, driving hatred towards them, pushing them away. But it's actually all about getting power and money out of them.
Mike Carr: Exactly. And in a way, what Philip's doing is comparable to what we see throughout history, really. And he's very good at doing this, how they prosecute this propaganda campaign. And also the seizure of the goods of these minority groups is very effectively sort of carried out. So with the Jews, he manages to sort of arrest and sort of seize the properties of the Jews in almost a day in 1306. And with the arrest of the Templars as well, this happens in a day. And it's sort of this incredibly sort of fast and efficient way of moving against the group without them really having any idea that this is going to happen. So, yeah, he's very effective and he combines this with the propaganda and things like that.
Matthew Lewis: Like he's got his top 10 heresies and a playbook that works and he just rolls it out against the Templars when the time's right.
Mike Carr: Exactly. And everything else fits in. The Templars, you know, with the fall of the Holy Land, they're an easier target than they would have been pre-1291. The papacy is not going to be able to help them because of what's happened with Boniface VIII. So really, when you look at it from a historical point of view and you see all these things happening, it almost looks inevitable that the Templars will be the next target. But it's all about Philip. If Philip wasn't king, the Templars wouldn't have been arrested. I mean, it's purely down to his need for the money, in my view anyway. However, I want to just sort of complicate that slightly. And I think, yes, he's financially motivated. But also, I don't think we should necessarily presume that he doesn't believe the accusations of heresy as well. And this idea, these sort of trumped up accusations that I mentioned before, they are sort of quite widespread within European thinking at that time. And I think from what we know of Philip's character, he is very religiously conservative and pious. So he might have actually had a sort of genuine belief in the accusations that his advisers and he was hearing about the Templars. And it was probably very convenient that this also was a means of him being able to get their money while supposedly suppressing this heresy.
Matthew Lewis: Yeah, we can be quite cynical about the medieval aspect or opinions on religion. You know, it was such an important part of what they do that it doesn't have to be religion was using an excuse to do something. It can be that I have a genuine religious belief that this is happening. It's also quite convenient for me.
Mike Carr: Exactly. Coincidentally. Yeah. And I think those two motivations can work hand in hand. And yeah, it's very tempting to separate them out and see that seeing them as being somehow opposed.
Matthew Lewis: One is a cynical excuse for the other when it's not necessarily the case.
Mike Carr: Exactly. Yeah.
Matthew Lewis: And so how does all of this come to a head? What happens to the Templar? You mentioned before that there was a trial.
Mike Carr: Yeah. So basically on the Friday the 13th of October 1307, the Templars are arrested in France. It's a pretty amazing and fast operation. Barely any of the Templars escape and then they are tried. So what happens is before the arrests are made, Philip's actually circulated letters to all his sort of royal advisors and the people are going to carry out these arrests in different regions of France. And this actually has a list of the accusations that are being made against them. So this is something that these agents know in advance. And they're told basically to arrest the Templars, to imprison them, to sort of separate them as well so they can't communicate with one another, to torture them or threaten them with torture and to basically treat them very harshly. And at the same time, try and get them to confess to these crimes which have been drawn up. And in addition to this, he also wants an inventory of their various estates so he knows how much money, how much good stuff that he can get off them. And unfortunately for the Templars, they are a lot of the Templars in France. They're not your fighting men. They are, you know, just a standard people who work on these estates. You know, they work on the mills and the farms or whatnot. And they're completely unprepared for this. It takes them by surprise. They're either tortured or threatened with torture and a lot of them confess to these crimes, as you probably would when you're set in with torture. And really, as soon as that happens, it's very difficult for the Templars to go back. And it's very difficult for anyone to defend them because they've confessed to these heresies, or a lot of them have. If you retract your confession, you can then be deemed a relapsed heretic and burnt. So it's very difficult to go back on the confession once you've made it in these kinds of situations. And also from the papacy's point of view, what Philip's done is completely against the right sort of order. I suppose it's illegal in many ways in that he's imprisoned a religious order that's answerable to the papacy and sort of tried them himself. And actually, this should have come under the jurisdiction of the church. But again, once Philip's able to say to the Pope, well, look, they've confessed to a lot of this stuff, it's very difficult for the Pope to actually really step in and help them. And he does try and step in and support the Templars. But because of the difficult position that the Pope's in at the time and the sort of influence that Philip's able to exert over him, there's not really much that can be done. And the other rulers of Europe, the King of England, King of Aragon, they're a lot more sympathetic towards the Templars, but they're not willing to sort of confront Philip over this. He's the most powerful monarch in Europe. So essentially, once he does what he does and he forces these confessions, the order is doomed, pretty much.
Matthew Lewis: And what do we know about, so Robert de Sablé is the Grandmaster of the Templars in the game, in the First Crusade. What do we know about the last Grandmaster? How much of a fight does he put up to protect the Templars?
Mike Carr: Yeah, well, he's an interesting character. So Jacques de Molay is the last Grandmaster. I mean, he's really received quite a lot of criticism in scholarship, more recently, some more supportive reassessments of him. But really, he's unable to effectively defend the Templars. He's quite an old man. By the time of the arrest, he is tortured. And he also confesses very early on in the trial. And he does sort of backtrack and he sort of flip flops a little bit over his confession and sort of retracting it. But ultimately, he's not able to really sort of mount any kind of defense. And one of the problems is that the Templars are kept in isolation from one another. So it's difficult to see what Molay really could have done in that situation anyway, because he couldn't necessarily communicate with his fellow members of the order. But I think one of the problems for the rank and file is that they hear that Molay has confessed and they know that the other sort of high ranking Templars have also confessed and are not able to mount this resistance. So it does make it difficult for the Templars to mount their own defense, although they do try and do this. And there are sort of groups who are able to sort of mount some semi effective defense. But ultimately, nothing comes of this. And actually, what's interesting is that from the French perspective, there's a point in the trial around sort of 1310 or so where things start to get delayed because the papacy is insisting that the interrogations come under papal jurisdiction and so forth. And actually, the French start to burn some of the Templars as relapsed heretics, and about 50 of them are burned in Paris in 1310. And this really scares a lot of the other members of the order who are thinking about defending themselves. And a lot of them just hold their hands up and say that they're guilty and will take the punishments that don't result in their execution.
Matthew Lewis: I was going to ask how so many of them got burned, because the first instance of heresy doesn't normally carry a death penalty. You have to commit heresy the second time to get burned. So is this a case of them relapsing and perhaps under more pressure and torture confessing again? So then they're relapsed heretics, that second defense is what gets them burned.
Mike Carr: Yeah, yeah. So it's often that they've yeah, they've confessed and then they retract their confession and then they are deemed to be relapsed heretics. So that's the risk. Whereas if you confess and you accept your confession, you can be maybe you get perpetual imprisonment. That would be a particular harsh penalty. But otherwise, you know, you get smaller terms of imprisonment. And a lot of the Templars actually sometimes give them pensions and they join other religious orders sometimes. And they, you know, a lot of them survive the trial. They're not executed and they're not necessarily imprisoned for any great deal of time. So, yeah, I think for the sort of rank and file, it takes a lot of a lot of strength and a lot of courage to really stand up against torture. And if you have already confessed under torture to then retract your confession, because it's a good chance you'll be burnt as a result.
Matthew Lewis: And how then if this is mainly focused in France, and as you mentioned, the King of England, the King of Aragon, the Pope, other rulers aren't as hostile to the Templars. How does the international element of it collapse if it's brought down in France, why doesn't the rest of it survive?
Mike Carr: Yeah, that's a good question. I think from the point of view of the Kingdom of England, Kingdom of Aragon, that's sort of the two sort of interesting case studies in the sense that these are two areas where you have, you know, large numbers of Templars, and they're in close communication with the French and with the papacy and that sort of neighbouring French territory. So they're very much integrated in what's going on, and they're very aware of what's going on in France. And both the Kings of Aragon and the Kings of England, they, yeah, they sort of oppose what Philip's doing, and they don't necessarily agree with it. And in England, for example, you also don't have torture being used as part of common law. So, and the Templars are treated a lot more leniently, they're not forced into confessions in the same way for, and there are sort of people who come forward and support them and defend them. But ultimately, with the trial going so badly in France, I think the other kings realise that ultimately, the order is probably going to be suppressed at some point, because the Pope is going to have to do that. It's very difficult to, you know, suppress an order in one region and not in its totality.
Matthew Lewis: And I guess also, when there's confessions that they're doing all of these things, that's exactly their fate.
Mike Carr: Yeah, exactly. And I think for, and again, I don't want to sort of sound overly cynical here, but for the kings of England and Aragon, there is the opportunity of making the best of a bad situation. The Templars have accused of this, they're probably done for anyway, might as well play along with this and try and get some of the territories and some of their possessions for yourself and their money as well. So I think there is a point where other monarchs are willing to support the Templars, but when they see that really the game's up and their days are numbered, they're happy to sort of go along with what the Pope suggests and what the King of France is essentially pushing for.
Matthew Lewis: I suppose there's a bit of frightening kind of Realpolitik in there that they're going to fall anyway. If I go along with what Philip's trying to do, I might be able to get all of those lands and properties that they have, maybe get Philip on side a little bit.
Mike Carr: Exactly. Yeah. And Philip's, he's the most powerful monarch in Europe. So he's sort of a person who probably wants to keep on side.
Matthew Lewis: And as you mentioned there, not all of the Templars were executed. I think sometimes we think that they were all killed, you know, on that Friday the 13th. In the game, we see the Templars living on as a secret organisation kind of fronted by this multinational company. Do you think the Templars continued in any kind of guise or did they just disappear completely?
Mike Carr: There's two ways to think about it. I mean, on the one hand, the members didn't disappear, as you said, they survived. So there is the continuity in that, yes, these people are still there, but the organisation is completely suppressed. So there is no pseudo-Templar continuation, but you do have things like in Iberia, there's a couple of orders that were established in the years after the trial, which have Templar estates and have ex-members of the Templars forming part of them. Likewise, some of the Templar estates are meant to be handed to the Hospitallers as it doesn't really happen in reality. So the Hospitallers do absorb some of the Templar estates as well. So there is a continuity in that sense, but in an organisational sense, the order is no more.
Matthew Lewis: I guess it's just that the game plays into that kind of idea that they weren't wiped out and something could have continued, you know, if they were reluctant to leave the Templar order, they could have kept going in secret. We can't disprove that, can we, I guess?
Mike Carr: No, no, I suppose not. And I think a lot of idea also comes from the 18th, 19th century, the Masonic reimagining of Templars and the idea that some of the Templars fled from France to England and Ireland and Scotland and established these secretive orders. And I think there's no historical evidence for any of this. So from a historical point of view, it's not true. But yeah, you can see why people believe that and why that's been constructed.
Matthew Lewis: And I guess just to end on, I wonder why you think we're so interested in the Templars. I think it's possible to position them as kind of, you know, they drove religious war and strife in the Near East, were powerful, wealthy landlords in Europe, and then they fell having confessed to this whole ream of crimes and heresies and were relatively short-lived in the grand scheme of history, yet they seem to have this hold over the collective imagination. Why are we so obsessed with the Templars?
Mike Carr: Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think a trial has so much to do with it, the fact, as you said yourself, the fact that you have this prestigious order that they're defending the Holy Land and all that, and then they are tried and suppressed as heretics, essentially, which is sort of anathema to what they were meant to be doing. And I think the secretive nature of the Templars, which we've alluded to a few times, is a big part of that. It just makes them so open to this kind of myth history, this sort of pseudo-history that's developed over the years afterwards, which I think has sort of fuelled this fascination with them. And even at the time, in the years just after the trial, you have the curse of Jacques de Molay, the idea, because Jacques de Molay is executed in 1314, and shortly after Clement V, the Pope, and Philip IV, the King, die as well in the same year. And there's this idea that Jacques de Molay, when he's been led to the stake, he sort of says, you're both going to die in the same year. And this is sort of propagated by chroniclers in the years after the trial. So this sort of Templar myth and the curse of Molay were sort of contemporary ideas as well. So I think it shocked Europe at the time, undoubtedly. And it led to these myths and these legends, which I think are perpetuated. And it's such a ripe area of history for this kind of myth history, if you like.
Matthew Lewis: It's almost a perfect story as well, isn't it? You know, we can see the birth, we can see the expansion, the growth to these great heights, and then we can see this huge fall, which kind of seems to close the book, but sort of leaves a bookmark in there that conspiracy theories can wheedle into.
Mike Carr: Exactly. And also, I think just looking at the sort of history of the Templars, from a historian's perspective, they sort of fit into most aspects of the medieval world, you know, they're involved in the Crusades, but they're big sort of landowners in the West. They're a monastic order, they're a military order, they're part of the church, but they cross into so much of the medieval world in some way that I think they are a very interesting topic to study as well. So I think I suppose that's another reason why people are sort of fascinated by it.
Matthew Lewis: And I guess also in a world that's almost always been obsessed with chivalry and knights and things like that, they're seen as the pinnacle, the ultimate fighting force of the medieval world as well.
Mike Carr: Exactly. Yeah, there's all the sort of chivalric side of things and the romantic side of things as well.
Matthew Lewis: Fascinating. It's been brilliant to dive into the, well, unfortunate for them that they fell, but brilliant for us to dive into it. And thank you so much for sharing all of that with us, Mike.
Mike Carr: No problem. It's my pleasure. Thanks so much.
Matthew Lewis: That's the end of our series on Assassins vs Templars. Thank you for listening to the fall of the Templars and make sure you haven't missed any of the rest of this special series. There's eight episodes of Assassins vs Templars for you to enjoy.

Make sure you're following the Echoes of History podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to listen to the rest of the series. There's episodes with world leading experts on the Crusades, the Knights Templar, and the rise of the Assassins. This series is a special collaboration between Ubisoft and History Hit with post-production undertaken by Paradiso Media.

Baghdad Soundwalks

Hammam

Deana Hassanein: Baghdad Sound Walks Hello fellow travelers, I'm Deana–
Ali Olomi: –and I'm Ali. Where should we travel to today, Deana?
Deana Hassanein: To be honest Ali, I'm feeling like taking it easy, maybe something more relaxing after the marketplace and the mosque. I just want to chill.
Ali Olomi: I've got just the thing for you. Let's make our way to the hammam.
Deana Hassanein: When you say hammam, you mean the bathhouse, a public house, right?
Ali Olomi: Right. But Deana, the hammam is so much, much more than that.
Deana Hassanein: I know that they were very popular back in the day and still are in lots of places around the world.
Ali Olomi: They're called the Thermae, if I can remember my Latin. It's been a little bit, but they were really popular and they were a hangout spot for the Romans, particularly wealthy ones. In fact, some of the oldest hammams in the world are found in old Roman territories, like Syria and then eventually Baghdad and the rest of the Islamic world.
Deana Hassanein: Please tell me, what would I see?
Ali Olomi: Well, first the hammam would be located relatively close to the mosque or sometimes near the marketplace. You want it nearby because everyday activity would be around it. So it's easily accessible.
Deana Hassanein: Yeah. Especially for Muslims, you know, throughout the day they have to maintain a certain level of hygiene. It's very important Islamically and even before they pray, they have to perform wudu. So I get that. That makes sense.
Ali Olomi: Yeah. So hammam served in some ways, a religious function, like you're pointing out, but they also had access to baths and cleanliness more broadly. And they were also incredibly social.
Deana Hassanein: Surprise, surprise. Everything is social in Baghdad.
Ali Olomi: Extroverts through and through. They like to hang out and relax at the same time. Honestly, it may actually be better to see them as a sort of spa rather than like a bathhouse. So if we were making our way to the hammam, we would see a structure with some type of a dome and a courtyard on the outside leading to the doors.
Deana Hassanein: Okay. Tell me more.
Ali Olomi: But this is where we're going to have to part ways, Deana.
Deana Hassanein: Okay. That makes sense. We can't enter together.
Ali Olomi: Yeah. Like the harem, hammam was a pretty gendered space. In the marketplace and in public, you've got men and women that did intermingle with one another, but not the hammam, not the bath space.
Deana Hassanein: That's still quite similar to spa places nowadays as well. You have different spaces for different people.
Ali Olomi: Right, yeah.
Deana Hassanein: So did they have different spaces like spas do today?
Ali Olomi: Sometimes I think, but mostly in Abbasid Baghdad, what we're seeing is different times of the day for men and different times for women.
Deana Hassanein: Okay. So we'd walk in at separate times, but we'd both have access to the same hammam. Shall we take a peek?
Ali Olomi: All right. So up first, we're going to see the outer chamber. This is where we take off our clothes and wrap ourselves in small cloths.
Deana Hassanein: That's why there are different times for men and women.
Ali Olomi: Yeah. And in addition, there's going to be a sort of successive layout that's a Roman inspiration.
Deana Hassanein: What would that be like?
Ali Olomi: There would be rooms right after one another. So one room back to back.
Deana Hassanein: Okay. Let's keep exploring the space. I'm excited.
Ali Olomi: All right. Once we've started to undress ourselves or we've gone through the undressing room, the first room up is called the cold room, cleverly titled because this is the room that has no heat in it. It has the attendance with the fans to keep you cool in that Baghdad heat. It’s got benches and cushions so that you can sit and chill and relax. And of course, people congregate and chat and play. There were board games, sometimes music, food, and even...
Deana Hassanein: Oh, I know what you're going to say.
Ali Olomi: Shisha
Deana Hassanein: Shisha.
Ali Olomi: You know me too well, Deana. You know me too well.
Deana Hassanein: Just before you carry on, Ali, what do you mean there was food?
Ali Olomi: They would eat in these places.
Deana Hassanein: Like food, food, not snacks?
Ali Olomi: Mostly fruit.
Deana Hassanein: Okay.
Ali Olomi: So you'd have some grapes, you'd have some oranges, citruses, and chilled drinks called sherbets.
Deana Hassanein: Okay. What comes next?
Ali Olomi: After the cold room comes the warm room. So you can see there's a logic here. Things get even more comfortable. Here you've got fragrant incenses and steam that keeps the room warm as you lounge and just let the worries of the day melt away.
Deana Hassanein: My eyes are closed. I'm visualizing it.
Ali Olomi: Oh, there's more. There's more. This is the massage parlor.
Deana Hassanein: A massage parlor?
Ali Olomi: Yep.
Deana Hassanein: For free?
Ali Olomi: For free.
Deana Hassanein: No.
Ali Olomi: Yes. This was a public service.
Deana Hassanein: Oh my God. Okay. Everything's changed. I'm now a hundred times more excited. I thought this would be somewhere that people go to buy these services.
Ali Olomi: Nope. This is a public service because hygiene is a public service. You want a healthy population. So let them get into those baths.
Deana Hassanein: Okay. We're not calling it a bathhouse anymore. This is officially a spa. And you said that there are different rooms with different experiences. One's social and one's relaxing.
Ali Olomi: And the more you move through the hammam, the more relaxing it gets, the more intimate it gets.
Deana Hassanein: What do you mean intimate?
Ali Olomi: Well, if you're going from eating and chatting to massage, that's pretty intimate.
Deana Hassanein: I could really do with a massage. I haven't had one since like 2017.
Ali Olomi: Just keep in mind though, massages and hammams tend to be really vigorous with like lots of joint pulling and hard rubbing. The idea was to kind of get the blood flowing as much as it was to relax you. I mean, I've experienced a hammam in Istanbul. First of all, one of the most awkward experiences in my life. And two, he pulled my limbs in directions that my limbs don't go in.
Deana Hassanein: Sad story aside of your experience in Istanbul, I feel like what you're describing is, as you mentioned, a health center, because I'm not going there for a nice relaxing Thai massage. I'm going to fix my body.
Ali Olomi: That's actually a really great way to think about it, because in addition to the massage, you have three other big services. First, you go in there, you're going to get a nice trim. You're going to get your beard lined up, your hair done. This is where the barbers were hanging out and they made sure you look pretty. Then you had your physicians. So while the massage person is moving your limbs in directions that they don't go, the physician is telling you, all right, you need to watch your diet and eat this particular medicine and make sure you get lots of exercise. And then they have one of the coolest, cupping. Cupping is really, really popular. Have you ever heard of cupping before?
Deana Hassanein: I have. You'll probably be able to explain it better than me.
Ali Olomi: They're still in Cairo, right?
Deana Hassanein: Definitely. And there's a lot of people that do it in the UK as well. It has become quite popular, but it's this sucking method that kind of brings the blood to the surface, right?
Ali Olomi: I've seen it. I've never had it done. I don't think it looks too relaxing, but people swear by it. They say it's really good for your health.
Deana Hassanein: I'm just still not over the fact that I could go into a spa, get a massage, get some fruit, get my hair cut all for free. They really had it all.
Ali Olomi: Yeah, totally.
Deana Hassanein: You can see how the hammam wasn't just for religious cleansing, because this was actually more of a social function. And you even mentioned about the physician. So this is actually connected to health.
Ali Olomi: I love that you actually called it a health center. It's changed my whole world right now. I'm going to call it a health center going forward because it really was what it was. It was tied to health. We even have examples from medieval doctors that say and prescribe, you need to go and visit the hammam. It was the most common flu remedy. If you get feeling a little congested, go and hang out in the steam rooms. And it was also recommended after childbirth as a deep cleansing for the woman, but also to really restore her muscles and her joints after childbirth.
Deana Hassanein: You know, it's kind of sad to hear this because I don't feel like we take care of ourselves anymore hearing this.
Ali Olomi: They really had it good with this hammam.
Deana Hassanein: Oh my God. So after our massage, cupping and haircut, what comes next?
Ali Olomi: Logically after the warm room, the hot room.
Deana Hassanein: The shock. This is where we get to the bath portion. I'm already a little bit iffy on.
Ali Olomi: I'm iffy about this too. But after the scrubbing and the rubbing, there comes the washing down with hot water and steam.
Deana Hassanein: And is that communal, Ali, or are you still in separate rooms for this?
Ali Olomi: It's communal.
Deana Hassanein: Okay. The technology and architecture here is actually very interesting. To get different temperatures in each room to move around steam, to keep the water hot for the hot room, you'd really need a lot of precise designs.
Ali Olomi: This is the magic of engineering. It's something that even I try to wrap my head around sometimes, just how advanced it was. I mean, the use of furnaces and vents, it was really ingenious how they were able to create the different temperatures. I read that they even had special shafts in the dome of the hot room so that it would get natural light and allow some of the steamed escape so it wasn't too hot, but hot enough.
Deana Hassanein: I love that they think of everything.
Ali Olomi: Right?
Deana Hassanein: So it's a health center, a community center, a bathhouse. Who was paying for all of this?
Ali Olomi: Mostly the caliph. The Abbasid Empire saw it as a public good, and so it was accessible regardless of wealth or class, though obviously the wealthy had better services.
Deana Hassanein: What more could you have?
Ali Olomi: Probably better quality oils and incenses and better masseurs.
Deana Hassanein: Okay, that makes total sense. And now that we've dived into what the bathhouse is, or as you want to call it now, a health center, it does make a lot of sense because hygiene is always connected to both religion and health. So I'm guessing the caliph frequently visited the hammam.
Ali Olomi: We do see some change here. Originally, the caliphs did. Later on, we're going to see some private hammams for the caliph, but originally, the caliph and his family would use the exact same hammam as everyone else, just at different times of the day.
Deana Hassanein: I still find that so weird.
Ali Olomi: It's a little weird. In fact, I got a story for you. The hammam, because it was public, was one of the few places that the caliph could probably be attacked. And in fact, one of the caliphs were. Al-Ma'mun, supposedly there was a plot in order to kill him when he went to the hammam. But he was warned of the plot in advance by his advisors and the court astrologers. So he sent someone else in his place, his advisor, al-Fadl. And what happens to poor al-Fadl? They mistake him for the caliph and he ends up getting killed. Horrible, messed up story, huh?
Deana Hassanein: Yeah.
Ali Olomi: But it shows that these spaces were still very political spaces.
Deana Hassanein: I can always rely on you, Ali, to give me a random exciting story. I had fun in the hammam. We got a chance to relax, socialize, get a massage, wash away all our problems. And thankfully, I'm not on anyone's assassinations list. Next time, let's go somewhere even more exciting. I'm Deana.
Ali Olomi: And I'm Ali. This is a Ubisoft podcast produced by Paradiso Media. Be sure to subscribe to the Echoes of History podcast so you don't miss the next episode of Baghdad Soundwalks. See you next time, fellow travelers.

The Caravanserai

Deana Hassanein: Baghdad Sound Walks Hello fellow travellers, I'm Deana–
Ali Olomi: And I'm Ali. How are you feeling today, Deana?
Deana Hassanein: I'm feeling very well, thank you, Ali. How are you feeling?
Ali Olomi: Pretty good, I'm happy to be here.
Deana Hassanein: Where are we off to today?
Ali Olomi: So, how about we take a jaunt to an ancient structure that was what made Baghdad what it was today. The Caravanserai or the funduq.
Deana Hassanein: Ancient? So you're saying this existed before Baghdad and the Islamic empires?
Ali Olomi: That's right. What do you know about the Silk Roads? Because this is something we're going to be talking about a little bit.
Deana Hassanein: This is my favourite thing to say whenever this comes up. Spoiler alert, it isn't an actual road. It's not one single road. It refers to a network of trading routes that links the Middle East, Asia and the Western world.
Ali Olomi: Oh, I love that.
Deana Hassanein: Thank you.
Ali Olomi: My historian heart got so happy. Yeah, the Silk Roads aren't really a road, it's a network. The trade is mostly local and it's really about the movement of various goods. How about another question for you? Because this is all about trade. Do you know that there are different types of camels?
Deana Hassanein: There's actually only two true types of camels, right?
Ali Olomi: That's right. Arabian camels or dromedaries, which have one hump and Sogdian camels from Persia, which have two. I'm very hesitant here because that's the extent of my camel knowledge.
Deana Hassanein: Today is your lucky day, Ali, because I'm going to add some facts for you so you can add it to your list. Camels are born without humps. They store water in their blood. They have three sets of eyelids and two rows of eyelashes to keep sand out of their eye. They can shut their nostrils completely and they can survive up to 15 days without water, which makes them the perfect animal to transport goods on the Silk Roads.
Ali Olomi: You're blowing my mind a little bit here. Do you know the camel experts? I love it. And you're right, they're absolutely excellent for carrying heavy burdens and they could go long distances without food.
Deana Hassanein: Exactly, but back to the Silk Roads, they existed well before the Islamic empires and I remember studying how the ancient Persians, Romans and Chinese were all part of it, right?
Ali Olomi: Yeah, there were a series of roads that existed, but they were really expanded under the Achaemenids, which were an ancient Persian empire and it was part of their royal road project.
Deana Hassanein: Exactly, and since Baghdad is the inheritor of those old Persian empires, it makes sense why it was smack bang in the middle of those roads. Shall we do a bit of sightseeing? What would we see?
Ali Olomi: You would see merchants and caravans of camel which would move goods from all over the region. We know, for example, that they brought paper and porcelain from China. In fact, we even have evidence in China itself of the Silk Roads connecting Baghdad. There's this famous burial of a Sogdian, which is a Persian person in China and the inscription says this person is from the Persian world. They were very good at bartering and trade and negotiating.
Deana Hassanein: Wow, what a nice little comment to leave about someone. What's so striking about history is how we have these like little traces of life stories carved on stones, paper, images of people traveling, doing business. They leave things behind, you know, vases, coins, jewelry.
Ali Olomi: It really makes you wonder what traces we'll leave behind. In a hundred years from now, what evidence of our life will there be?
Deana Hassanein: It doesn't sound exciting because obviously we live in this era, but I'm guessing cars, coffee receipts, sprawls, electronic devices.
Ali Olomi: Snapchat, Instagram selfies. Gotta think about those things as a historian.
Deana Hassanein: You're right. There's going to be a lot of online content for them to delve through and maybe future historians will hear these podcasts as well.
Ali Olomi: That is a comforting thought. Hello, future historians.
Deana Hassanein: You know, the more I think about it, the more I'm really stunned by the long distances these caravans covered. And just to be clear, I know obviously caravans now are vehicles, but back then it was a term used to basically describe groups of people traveling.
Ali Olomi: And this is actually where the funduq comes into play. They were probably originally built by those Persians, the Achaemenids, as roadside taverns or inns. They were dwellings that connected all these roads together. In fact, that's where the idea of hostels come from.
Deana Hassanein: Did they invent them?
Ali Olomi: Not really. They pre-existed.
Deana Hassanein: I would love to know what it looked like. Can you describe it to me?
Ali Olomi: They're pretty simple structures. They're kind of a rectangle with walls that has a space for your horses and camels, a place where you can eat and a place where you can sleep. Not really how we would imagine a nice hotel today.
Deana Hassanein: What was it built from?
Ali Olomi: Generally wood, sometimes clay, sometimes mud. They're very simple. When you look at them, they're minimalist design. Just a square wall that you can hide away from thieves, brigands, and the weather.
Deana Hassanein: Yeah. It's not giving Four Seasons. It's giving a hut.
Ali Olomi: No pool, no gym, no continental breakfast.
Deana Hassanein: Well, I mean, it makes sense. Travelers do need a place to stay.
Ali Olomi: There's the first rule of history. You need to eat. And then the second rule of history, you got to build places to eat and sleep.
Deana Hassanein: Pretty straightforward. And these rules also apply to me.
Ali Olomi: Me too. And that's where these funduqs came into play. They were organizing these roads, but it was also about providing food and shelter. It's what made trade along distances possible. If you're traveling along miles and miles of roads, you need to stop somewhere to eat and somewhere to sleep.
Deana Hassanein: So when the Abbasids built Baghdad, they incorporated these caravanserais.
Ali Olomi: Yeah, the early Islamic dynasties made use of them even before the Abbasids. In fact, given how important trade was to the beginning of Islam, I mean, Muhammad was a merchant after all, before he became a prophet. All of these funduq were instrumental to actually the rise of Islam. Before Muslim armies and empires ever showed up onto the scene, Muslim merchants were there first.
Deana Hassanein: And then with Baghdad, it would be right in the center of those roads and the different roadside inns.
Ali Olomi: That's a good point. By the time of the Abbasids, they had incorporated these funduq into their trade system. But also they built many of their own, generally around Baghdad.
Deana Hassanein: Why around the city? Was it because of the way the trade flows?
Ali Olomi: Definitely. It helped with the overflow. Over time, the city grew beyond the initial bounds of Mansur's design in 762. You have this sprawling city with millions of people connected to the flow of roads, people, and goods. In fact, the medieval traveler Ibn Battuta gives us a fascinating description. He says, after sunset or nightfall, the director comes to the funduq with his secretary and writes down the names of all the travelers who will pass the night there. He seals it and locks the door of the funduq. In the morning, he and the secretary come and call everybody's name and write down a record. He sends someone with the travelers to conduct them to the next post station, and he brings back a certificate from the director of funduq, confirming that they have all arrived. So it's a system that connects all the funduqs together, one to the next to the next.
Deana Hassanein: Oh my god, this isn't just super efficient, but this is literally a postal system with bodyguards.
Ali Olomi: Yeah, that's exactly what they were. This is what allowed their communication to happen in the empire, a relay system that allowed you to send a message quickly, because rather than one person running the entire distance, they would run to a funduq, someone would take over the message, then they would run to the next funduq, someone else would take the message. So you always had fresh horses, fresh messengers, and you were able to travel long distances very quickly.
Deana Hassanein: And were the guards really that necessary? Was it that dangerous?
Ali Olomi: Yes, very dangerous. I mean, you're out in the deserts, you're out in the mountains, you're out in the plains, you're looking at a variety of different topographies and geographies, and that's where all the thieves were hanging out.
Deana Hassanein: This is literally a postal system with bodyguards. And I get it, because I imagine these merchants were targets for brigands and thieves on the road.
Ali Olomi: Absolutely. The funduqs were the safest way to travel and the fastest way to travel. Without them, you want to avoid the roads, because that's where the thieves would be hanging out. That's why we call them highwaymen, right? They're on the highway. But now with the funduqs, you can travel that road and be safe. So it was a quick way to travel and a fast way to send your messages from funduq to funduq to funduq.
Deana Hassanein: Here's me thinking a funduq is just a hotel, but it's actually so much more. It creates a good deal of safety. You record everyone that's staying. You then guide them to the next funduq and check that everyone's off your roster. What an efficient system.
Ali Olomi: Very efficient. But I've got to say, they could also be quite rowdy, the funduqs, that is.
Deana Hassanein: What do you mean they could be rowdy?
Ali Olomi: Yeah, I mean, we see a lot of stories of things going wrong in funduqs. If you've got a lot of people gathering together after a long day of travel in the heat and in the desert, and you've just come together to eat and drink, maybe sometimes with strangers, things are going to go wrong. Tempers are going to flare.
Deana Hassanein: Give me a story. You can't just tease them, not tell me a story.
Ali Olomi: I have a great story about one of these trips to the funduqs. So there is this famous astrologer known as Abu Ma'shar. He is an icon and a legend and we'll be talking about him in the future. But he's traveling to one of these funduqs with a bunch of different merchants. They spend the night and the next morning, Abu Ma'shar wakes up and he casts his horoscope and he goes, the stars do not look good today. We should not leave the funduq. And the merchants are like, oh, we don't need to listen to you. That's silly. We're going to leave. They leave. Abu Ma'shar says, no, I'm going to follow the advice of the stars. And he hangs out in the funduq only for the merchants to come back a couple hours later. Some of them are bleeding. Their goods are missing. They had been attacked by thieves and brigands. But in their mind, Abu Ma'shar was part of the thieves and brigands. Somehow he had caused it. So they took their anger out on him. They took out their sticks and attacked him. The guards had to intervene. Abu Ma'shar fled for his life and famously wrote in his diary, never again shall I share wisdom with fools who will not listen.
Deana Hassanein: Oh, my God. Plot twist.
Ali Olomi: Plot twist. The astrologer gets blamed for the funduk's troubles.
Deana Hassanein: To be fair, as someone who's not hugely obsessed with horoscopes, it kind of does sound like he was involved.
Ali Olomi: It does sound shady. And Abu Ma'shar was slightly shady. Let's be real.
Deana Hassanein: Oh, travel and trade. That is good advice for all of us, though. Avoid the troublemakers.
Ali Olomi: That's right.
Deana Hassanein: It was so nice that we got a chance to travel outside of Baghdad today. It's the first time in the season. And I'm in awe of these super efficient systems, this postal service slash bodyguard system that allowed trade to flow so well. Yes, they did exist before Baghdad and became a huge part of the city, the role in its trade. It's all tied into these repeated themes that we keep seeing. How Baghdad was built on history of the region, but also expanded in it. Next time, let's travel to its political heart, the Palace of the Golden Gate. I'm Deana.
Ali Olomi: And I'm Ali. This is a Ubisoft podcast produced by Paradiso Media. Be sure to subscribe to the Echoes of History podcast so you don't miss out the next episode of Baghdad Soundwalks. See you next time, fellow travelers.

The Palace of the Golden Gate

Deana Hassanein: Baghdad Sound Walks. Hello fellow travelers, I'm Deana.
Ali Olomi: And I'm Ali, ready to continue our tour of medieval Baghdad.
Deana Hassanein: I'm always ready, Ali. Little by little we are seeing this city come to life.
Ali Olomi: We've been to its walls, its market, its bathhouses, the inns, and the great mosque.
Deana Hassanein: And it's finally time to head to the palace. As you can hear in my voice, I'm very, very excited about this. A theme we keep seeing throughout the different locations is how much politics was woven into each part of the city. From handling trade to the sermons said on behalf of the Caliph. And now it's time to get right to the center of it all. The Palace of the Golden Gate was in the center of Baghdad, near the mosque.
Ali Olomi: That's right, a stunning structure really meant to impress. Imagine with me, you're a new visitor to the city, or you're a traveler coming in from one of the funduq. You've traveled for miles, perhaps stopping at the various caravans sarai along the way, slowly making your way into the Round City. There's a bustle as the crowds of visitors like you wind their way from the many roads to the gates of Baghdad. As you pass the entry, you see it right in your line of sight. The palace in the center of the city, rising above all the other buildings with its gleaming green dome that stands out against the backdrop. Atop that dome is a figure of a horseman with a lance. The traveler next to you whispers into your ear, legend has it the figure is enchanted. When enemy armies march on Baghdad, the Caliph turns the figure to face the oncoming horde. It's eye-catching, inspiring, and it lets you know who's in charge.
Deana Hassanein: The Caliph, it makes it very, very clear. The idea of a Round City is making more and more sense. In a way, all the roads lead to the Caliph. You can see the city from afar, and you know the most important person is right in the middle. It would also make the palace the center of city life. It's basically giving main character energy.
Ali Olomi: I love that, that's really important to know. The palace is not just this private residence of the Caliph.
Deana Hassanein: Right, because that's technically the harem where the household including the wives and all the children live. The harem is the private quarters of the Caliph.
Ali Olomi: And the palace was the official seat of power.
Deana Hassanein: And as we've talked about this before, the palace was built alongside the Great Mosque, so it was technically accessible to the public.
Ali Olomi: You know, the palace and the mosque were probably the first two structures built by al-Mansur, allowing him to move in quickly.
Deana Hassanein: Set right in the center of the Round City.
Ali Olomi: Like Ba Sing Se.
Deana Hassanein: Gosh, you really love your Avatar: The Last Airbender, right?
Ali Olomi: It's a good analogy.
Deana Hassanein: I can definitely see the symbolism though. Building a circular city and putting your palace right in the middle lets the world know who is in charge.
Ali Olomi: Definitely, Deana. It puts you in the center of the world symbolically. But it was also about drawing the people right into that center.
Deana Hassanein: This is why the mosque was adjacent to it. Putting the palace and the mosque together, or at least next to each other, sends a clear message. It's the center of religious life and political life. It was probably a powerful sight seeing the Caliph walk next door to join in the prayers as well.
Ali Olomi: Yeah, the palace was the Caliphal residence, but it was also the public administration. It had this sort of wide open courtyard, or a maidan, with surrounding gardens, a structure, a house, the hujariyah, or the horse guard. That is the private guard of the Khalif, these people who would protect him. And then there were smaller residences for administrators, the captain of the shurta, or the city guard, bureaucrats, and even palaces for the princes, all next door to that mosque.
Deana Hassanein: Do you know what really stands out to me, Ali? The city design tries to balance prestige and access. So the closer you get to the center, the closer you are to the center of power. I can just never imagine popping to the center of London and casually running into the king.
Ali Olomi: Yeah, the structure of the city, this round city, it tries to balance it all. It tries to create prestige for the Caliph, while technically also being accessible, because the mosque is also in that center. So it would draw everyone to stand before God in prayer equally. But it's a non-subtle way of reinforcing who's in charge, because the Caliph is right next door.
Deana Hassanein: Exactly, the people with all the real power. Think about it. The Khalif only has to walk next door to the mosque, but anyone else would have to walk much further if they wanted to visit it. The design of the city really highlights access, who has it and who has to work for it.
Ali Olomi: Over time though, we should point out that Caliphs really built other palaces. So there was this central palace that was a symbol of their power, but they weren't always at home in that central palace.
Deana Hassanein: Were these palaces within Baghdad itself or elsewhere? Because I'd imagine there is a difference between having other palaces within the city walls versus having to travel outside the city. This actually reminds me of why the rivers were probably so important, easy access up and down the Tigris.
Ali Olomi: That's a really good point. You could take a leisurely barge up to your palace. And some of these Caliphs did have winter palaces and other locales they'd like to visit, like Anbar. But they also built palaces inside Baghdad, like Qasr al-Khuld or the Palace of Eternity, which was built right on the river.
Deana Hassanein: That is prime time waterfront property. It reminds me a little bit of the Thames in London and how it was used to travel the length of England and how kings sailed on barges.
Ali Olomi: Royals do seem to love taking trips on barges for some reason.
Deana Hassanein: I love being on the water, so I get it. If you were a Khalif, you could enjoy a leisurely trip on the river while hanging out in your waterfront palace. Doesn't get better than that. Why don't we go inside the palace? Maybe we can paint a bit of a picture and see how the other half lives. What can we see?
Ali Olomi: Well, the first thing you would see are the guards. The Khalif, despite claiming this title, like the shadow of God on earth, had to manage a lot of different power blocks. He had to navigate big, powerful alliances.
Deana Hassanein: Yeah, and the guards were one of those. This is an empire after all. So you had scholars and administrators and advisors, but you also had to deal with the people who kept security in the city itself.
Ali Olomi: Exactly. The Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads in 750 CE and they established their own dynasty, but they were only able to do that with the help of other factions. In fact, they initially didn't even have a centralized army, but relied on different units.
Deana Hassanein: And each of these had their own political interests as well.
Ali Olomi: Very much so. You had three big units, the Anba, which were the old guard. These were the Arabian Muslims that had come out of Arabia and settled in the region. There's the Maghreba, who are mostly East and North African soldiers, and the Khorasaniya, which were local Persians, each with their own political intentions and their political goals.
Deana Hassanein: I remember a story that you mentioned before about how the troops once revolted and it took the queen intervening to settle them down. I believe it was Queen Khayzuran. She intervened to ensure her chosen successor.
Ali Olomi: And that's because they were paid troops. And so they did rebel from time to time. Each faction had its own politics and interests that the Caliph would have to navigate. The Anba, for example, as I mentioned, were the oldest and most powerful faction. They were made up of the Arabs who had settled into this region. And they intermarried with local elites, so the Caliph would have to make sure that he kept them on his side.
Deana Hassanein: These are houses that are run by hereditary lords or ladies. They hold titles and land and have a great deal of power and influence within the family. Think Bridgerton, but less entertaining.
Ali Olomi: All right, confession. I've never actually seen that show.
Deana Hassanein: Oh my God, Ali. But you've watched Avatar and the Airbender like 70 billion times.
Ali Olomi: That should tell you all about my personality. Look, lineage here really matters. And there were certainly noble families, but it really wasn't exactly an aristocracy like we would imagine in, say, Europe. Instead, what we have were powerful families that were originally local rulers, kings and commanders and generals that eventually sided with the Abbasids, one being the Tahirids.
Deana Hassanein: So the first thing we'd see was a show of power by these groups. This was their way of showing they were in the center of political life. They weren't just servants of the Khalif or his aides, but powerful in themselves.
Ali Olomi: Exactly. As you walked up to the palace, you would then be greeted by the hujariyah who patrolled the grounds and they had their building nearby. Then you'd actually see the anba and they always wore black, which was the Khalifu colors, and they represent the old guard. Then you would enter the palace itself and you would come across the chamberlain who's known as the Keeper of the Doors. I love all these titles. He would manage the number of visitors who could see the Khalif.
Deana Hassanein: Did the Caliph sit on a throne and wear a crown like how I imagine kings and queens?
Ali Olomi: Not exactly. What's funny?
Deana Hassanein: It's a valid question.
Ali Olomi: Because I could envision the Caliph sitting on a throne, but it isn't exactly like that. He had a cushion that he would be on, but more likely he had a formal seal, a special ring with an insignia. He had some type of staff of office they would care and he wore a mantle of power that they claimed actually came from Prophet Muhammad.
Deana Hassanein: What is a mantle of power?
Ali Olomi: It's like a cape, if you will, that you wear over your shoulders, but it goes down the front as well.
Deana Hassanein: You made it sound so cool. Then I was like, wow! And then it's a cape.
Ali Olomi: They have fancy names for everything.
Deana Hassanein: I love that. It sounds very grand and I can see the Khalif sitting in the palace decked in his royal garb. Confessionally, when I was younger, I was convinced that I was a princess and that my family had kidnapped me and my real family were out there looking for me and that one day they'd find me and I'd be decked out in gold from head to toe, still waiting.
Ali Olomi: If you didn't imagine some type of escape or fancy life, did you really have a childhood?
Deana Hassanein: Exactly.
Ali Olomi: All right. Imagine the space that is underneath the green dome of the palace. You've got elaborate silks, wooden panels carved with geometric designs that cleverly let in air and light, elaborate embroidery and fine clothing. And within all that finery, there is the Caliph, recognizable with his staff and mantle. You knew who he was by sight.
Deana Hassanein: Who would be with the Caliph? The palace has a lot of buzz to it, people coming and going, but there wasn't in a court, people who advised the Khalif or ran his empire for him, the government, if you like.
Ali Olomi: Yeah, there were scholars and philosophers and viziers. Remember, the Abbasids were warrior nerds. They loved to surround themselves with philosophers and host debates even.
Deana Hassanein: Kind of like the debate with Timothy.
Ali Olomi: Exactly. The court played chess, they debated philosophy, they listened to recited poetry, they even smoked...
Deana Hassanein: I know what you're going to say.
Ali Olomi: Shisha.
Deana Hassanein: Yeah, I knew that was coming.
Ali Olomi: And of course, they argued policy and strategy all while hearing petitions.
Deana Hassanein: It sounds very lively, Ali.
Ali Olomi: Lively, but also dangerous. Powerful families often vied for power in the court. One of them that started really early on with the Abbasids was the Barmakids. Let me ask you, have you ever seen Aladdin? Do you remember the vizier Jafar?
Deana Hassanein: It's only one of my favorite Disney movies. Of course, I remember Jafar with his black snake staff and Iago, his parrot.
Ali Olomi: Well, Jafar is based on an actual historical character.
Deana Hassanein: No.
Ali Olomi: Known as Jafar of the Barmakids. He was an advisor to the various caliphs and he was a patron of the arts. He supported different poets. And at one time, Harun al-Rashid, wanting to keep him close, marries him off to his sister just so that they have some type of political alliance. But it was not meant to be a love marriage. There was just meant to be a marriage of convenience so that the families were tied together. But Harun al-Rashid has no control over the matters of the heart and Jafar falls in love. And eventually, the caliph's sister ends up pregnant. And when Harun al-Rashid discovers it, he has Jafar executed. And this brings the Barmakids to an end. One great family destroyed by marriage.
Deana Hassanein: I'm sorry, we're gonna have to back up here. So he was expecting them to be married but not actually ever procreate.
Ali Olomi: Yes, he was very clear about that. It was a political marriage. No, no, no, you can get married, but don't you dare touch my sister.
Deana Hassanein: Oh my God, so that's the inspiration for Jafar.
Ali Olomi: It is.
Deana Hassanein: I feel like we've just scratched the surface of the messy politics of the Abbasids. There is so much depth to this palace. The location, the architecture, and the symbolism. The way it was more than just a private residence. The tricky navigating of power at the heart of it. The families like the Barmakids who were in the heart of power, all inside a palace at the center of a round city. In future episodes, we are going to dive even further into those politics. I'm Deana.
Ali Olomi: And I'm Ali. This is a Ubisoft podcast produced by Paradiso Media. Be sure to subscribe to Echoes of History podcast so you don't miss the next episode of Baghdad Sound Walks. See you next time, fellow travelers.

↑ Henderson, Tom (23 April 2024). EXCLUSIVE – Early Details on Assassin’s Creed Hexe. Insider Gaming. Archived from the original on 24 April 2024. Retrieved on 11 May 2024.

[1] Henderson, Tom (23 April 2024). EXCLUSIVE – Early Details on Assassin’s Creed Hexe. Insider Gaming. Archived from the original on 24 April 2024. Retrieved on 11 May 2024.

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Assassin's Creed Hexe

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Echoes of History transcripts

Assassins vs Templars

Baghdad Soundwalks

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User:VilkaIsBack/Sandbox

Assassin's Creed Hexe

Gameplay

Echoes of History transcripts

Assassins vs Templars

Baghdad Soundwalks

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