The Crusades: Assassins vs Templars

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It's the alien versus predator of the medieval world. Whoever wins, we lose.

One, a group of warrior monks in white mantles marked with those red crosses, swarmed to defend

pilgrims and fight for Christendom. The other, a secretive sect hidden in mountain fortresses, striking fear into rulers, through targeted surgical theatrical killings. Two small players, whose influence and survival depended not only on their bravery and skill and ambition, but also on the creation of a myth of invincibility by convincing

their enemies that this was a fight that they weren't going to win. Today, I'm joined again by the Crusading Expert, the historian Steve Tibble, to look at these two secretive religious orders that have been immortalised in legend and myth. We've got the Nazariish maelys, the assassins to you and me, and we've got the Templars. Who were they really? How did these two groups rise to positions of power and influence?

And were they truly enemies? Or just two forces caught up in the brutal and stable chaotic

politics of the Crusades?

“Before we get started, you should probably go and check out the first episode in this mini”

series, or this actual series. It's on the Crusades, we had it last week. That's your sweeping guide to those holy wars that swept across the Holy Land for 200 years, pitting Christianity against Islam. It's got all the juicy context you need to understand the bigger picture for this episode.

So, strap in, get those spurs on, and enjoy. Steve, good to see you. Very good to see you, Dan. You've got these two sort of semi-metically legendary orders. Did they, they were contemporary with each other? Did they, did they know each other?

Yeah, that's the weird thing about it on one level, they're both so larger than life. That you kind of feel like they shouldn't be history. They shouldn't be real. You know, it's kind of the alien's versus predator of the medieval world, but the reality is, they knew each other, they bounced off each other, they hated each other, they had many

different kinds of relationships, and they were in the same place at the same time. Yeah, it's incredibly weird. Weirdly, I'm guessing, almost quite good for their brain to have a bit of Ian and Ian going on. Yeah, there's definitely that. There's also a kind of interplay between, effectively, their methodology, the kind of brand

they project it, which is they are both on most empirical levels, they're small fish, and small fry in a big dangerous pond, but they both choose the same kind of Darwinistic approach, which is they're like the tiny animal that has a display and a kind of killer app that allows them to be much bigger than they really are. And I'd say it's wonderful just seeing how these two tiny groups project themselves in history.

Branding. Love it. Let's get into the back story, let's start with your sassins, where are we, geography, what is their nature? Yeah, yeah.

Well, just to be pedantic, start off with, I'm historian, so, you know, it's good to be pedantic.

“We're talking assassins with an uppercase, here, and that's a very important distinction,”

because this is a particular group of individuals, it's a sect, in effect, it's a religious sect, whereas if you look in the dictionary now, you get lots of references to the Mafia and contract killers, and I'm clearly, there's an overlap, there's a reason why contract killers are called assassins nowadays, and it's because there is a linkage with this religious sect, but back in the 12th century, which is mostly what we're talking about, they were

very much an oppressed minority, a small religious subset, they were, the proper name for them was Nizari Ishmaelis, and so they're an offshoot from Ishmaelism, Ishmaelism, isn't

That's a very simplified version of things, but it does mean that there is a faction of

“splitters, from splitters, so you can imagine, to many mainstream Muslims, particularly”

SUNY Muslims, they would be seen as heretics, even mainstream Ishmaelis, we're often trying to kill them as well, you know, so we're really talking about people who are on the extreme of their religious beliefs, but are very, very strong in that belief. Is there a geographical centre as well? Yes indeed, so they start off in Egypt, where the Fatmaid Ishmaelis are, and they form in 1094, there's a split, their leader, Nizari

is killed in convicting amongst the Ishmaelis in Egypt, and his followers, instead of doing

the sensible thing, you might think, which is to just call it quits, and fall in line

with everybody else, say, "No, we're not going to do this, we're going to go with our line of thinking," and they go off to Persia, so they go away from Egypt, Persia, and Persia at the time is controlled by Turks, who are foreign entrance into the region, and they're also SUNY's. So you get this kind of double whammy, so these Nizari Ishmaelis are heretics in Persia, Iran, and they often start something that's like the Vietnam War,

a kind of a nationalist ideological war against their SUNY overlords, and in doing so, they discover two things really. One is that they've got a great methodology, so they are tinian number, they are hated by everybody, they're surrounded, they don't have the big Turkey calmers of thousands of cavalry, so what do they do? They choose the real Darwinistic approach, which is to be fit for purpose, to their fittest rather than

factist, and they know, they understand, that they can really leverage power by killing one person. So if you have a tiny group of highly committed people, they can get places that an army of 10,000 cavalry can't go to, and you can use that as a really deadly weapon.

“I think the key thing is they understand that a good sniper is better than a thousand”

guys with shotguns, and then they move from Persia into Syria, which is where most are going to be talking about, and it's where a lot of the current legends of the Assassin's come from, the old man of the mountain is a Syrian assassin figure, and the characters that appear in Assassin's Creed and current cultural history are very much from the Syrian assassin, is mainly background.

But they're territorial really based, they have castles, they have lands, they collect rent, do they? I mean, how does that work? Yeah, no, that's interesting. So in Persia, they have, they kind of have their own little

niche in the northern mountains. In Syria, they eventually do the same. They, they first

of all try a different approach. They have this kind of blueprint where they think they can go into a city, they can influence the individual, who's, who's the control of the city, and then they can kind of insinuate their way into power, and they try that a couple of times, Hans and Aleppo, once in Damascus, big, big Muslim cities, both times it works for a while. So they, you know, for a few years, their great mates with the warlord who's in charge, the

trouble is as soon as he dies, suddenly their, their heretics who are resented, and there's an absolute massacre. So this happens twice, Aleppo and then Damascus, and then after that, they kind of realize this methodology isn't working. No, let's go for the Persian blueprint, which is move ourselves away from everybody else, find a nice home in the mountains, get a nice bunch of castles, and, and hold out there. And that's exactly what they do, and it's very impressive.

“I mean, there's even, I think there's talk of up to 70 assassin castles. I don't believe that figure.”

I mean, certainly not big castles, but they were, they had a whole network of castles in the mountains of what are now, I guess, Lebanon and southern Turkey, Syria. So they were able to create their own kind of little Princeton, principality, in the middle of probably one of the most dangerous and crowded places on the planet with this tiny community. So really it explains why they developed the methodology they did. You know, they're in the most dangerous place on earth. They're small,

they're heretics, they're hated. You only survive by being even more dangerous than the guys around you.

male as well, international as well. They're an idea that their head office is really in northern

“Persia, I guess, even though most of the action we're talking about is in the Holy Land.”

So the the Templars bizarrely occupy pretty much the same time and space. In fact, so closely, that they do actually bounce off each other quite a few times. So if you think about it, there's mailers, then the assassins are created in 1994. Within a few months of that,

the first Crusaders launched. So almost identical timing. The Crusades are launched and you find

European knights going out to the Middle East to try and recover the old Christian territories, the old Holy Land places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Nazareth and so on. The key problem for the Crusaders and for the Papacy is that when they recover Jerusalem, which is a huge piece of luck and there's not really something they could have expected, but they do, they can't share Jerusalem. But then most of the lads on the Crusade go home,

because they need to go home, they've been on the road for years and they see it as a one-off event. But for the Papacy, recovering the Holy Land is just the beginning. You've got to look after it.

“And defend it. And the only way you can defend it is by having a standing army, and the Templars,”

and the Hospitals, who are another military order, we're an attempt to create this kind of international force. I was going to say peacekeeping force, but it's not like that at all. Almost most of them might say. So sort of funded from lots, not a national army.

Not a... It's an international army. It's, I never know really what mercenary means.

Because everybody's got a, you know, a girl's got to live. So they need to get paid. But they are equally old volunteers, and they're, because they love their religion and their community, and they're trying to do the right thing. So bizarrely you find the same time as the Ashmalis, Nazari Ashmalis, in other words, the Assassins, are building up a castle network on the borders of the Crusader States in between what became known as the County of Tripoli,

which is Lebanon, and the Principality of Antioch, which would be Syria, Turkey. The Assassins, I'm the Templars, were both building classes on the same region. I mean, they were crazily close to each other. And actually for many, many years, for most of the 200 years, they were together. The Templars were the only people crazy enough and brave enough to extort money from the world's most dangerous people who are the assassins. So they had this weird

fractious relationship. They also both developed very, very similar methodologies. You know, the, the Templars, like the assassins, are very few in number. They're, they're surrounded, you know, they're surrounded by bigger, much bigger Muslim, politics, and they need to punch above their weight. And the thing about the Templars, like the assassins, is that they realise that

“if you've got only a small number of guys, you have to make everything count. So they, they”

pretty much adopted a similar methodologies. So where, where, with the assassins, you knew that if you, if you piss them off, they would chase you forever. You know, you wouldn't come out of the mosque without having to look over your shoulder, because even for decades they would follow you, and they would be somebody that killed you or your wife or your children. And the same with the Templars, except on the battlefield, a tiny number of Templars would just identify where your standard

was, and they would charge at you. And, and they wouldn't always get to you, but they're very

difficult to stop. And it's almost a kind of opposite, but parallel. You know, so the Templars you knew were in trouble, because they're coming right in your face, and with the assassins, you know you're in trouble, because they're coming right at your back. And, between the two of them, they had the same extraordinarily effective way of effectively creating a kind of a halo effect. So these small number of guys threw the power of branding and fear and leveraging

this brand of death, were able to project power in a way that, you know, even much larger groups couldn't dream of doing. And actually, the Templars, they could come from all over what we might cook Kristen and so we'll ever much of your own. Yeah, absolutely. And then they'd arrive in the home land, and there would, but people would also, there'd be fundraise, people would be passing the

for the Templars. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, relatively small numbers of guys, and in the, in the

“eastern Mediterranean, you might say they're, they're warmungers, you know, the eastern Mediterranean,”

these are the guys who are muscular, they're literally the militant arm of the, the papacy, they're the ones who are probably Europe's finest soldiers, volunteers who are superbly trained and disciplined, but the same group of Templars in Europe and Western Europe, are lawyers, you know, they're inventing investment banking, their diplomats, their schmoozers, you know, they're, their guys who are peace-mongers, because what the last thing they want is for Europe in power to be fighting,

what they want is for European kings to have enough money and time and peace to be able to go and

crusade themselves, and they also do shuffle money from the, the West, into the East, hence the

investment banking. Yeah, people say they invent, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, because, so, so someone in Ireland gives, uh, gives a few coins to the Templars,

“someone in Jerusalem is able to withdraw that from earth. Yeah, for example. Yeah, absolutely,”

via, via head office in Paris, you know, they, they could make those transfers happen, it, and in some ways, it doesn't look good, it makes them look greedy, you know, it makes them look like they're dealing with money, but in reality, they were doing it just as a way of helping the war effort, and when they were closed down, there were far less rich than anybody expected,

because it was just, you know, money going through the bank, but it, they were often on the

verge of bankruptcy, because the money was being spent on cars expensive business, expensive business, trying to maintain that. Yeah, exactly. Those cars are like, and off carry. Extra one. Yeah, yes, pardon me. Okay, so we've got these two groups. Uh, did, did, did, did, did they, you, you mentioned that they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they regarded each other as a primary enemy, or all, in the ever shifting mosaic of the Holy Land, did they

“be sometimes found themselves on different sides? Yeah, no, that was a very good point. The, I think”

it's, I forget who it was, who said it, Palmerston, maybe, uh, maybe sold free. You know, there was, there was an English Prime Minister who said, uh, her Majesty's government doesn't have friends, it has interests, and, and both of these groups are very much like that. So the assassins, you know, everybody assumes that they're, you know, completely financial matters, and, and against the, the crusaders, whereas in reality, they often fought on the same side as the crusaders. Um,

they actually allied themselves with the, the crusaders in many cases. Um, in fact, there's one wonderful instance where they negotiated so closely with, with the Christians and with King Amorek, that the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, that, that they were coming into a very close alliance. The, the Christians even believed that they might be coming open to conversion, which I actually doubt, but they were certainly cozying up, and, and ironically, they were philosophically

much more open-minded than than many of the other people. They were much more open-minded than, say, Catholic Christians or Sunni Muslims at the time. They, they used to read philosophy. They had, you know, played over their bedcides, and some of them is very, um, it's not impossible that they would have caused it up. And they were becoming so close that the Templars, who were there, neighbors, and extortionists, and landlords, you know, really hated it. And there was, um,

there was no agreement pretty much signed, and it was just being brought back to the Assassin's Councils by their diplomats, and there was a diplomatic convoy coming from from Jerusalem, back into the Assassin's Territories, escorted up to the border by the King of Jerusalem, who'd given them cast iron guarantees of safety. And as soon as the the Frankish bodyguards peeled off, a Templar force, commanded by a guy called Walter Demenil, who's like a Hollywood

cardboard caricature hitman, you know, he's got, he's got one eye, he's got scarring all over the place. This him and his lads just piled into the Assassin diplomats and budged them, killed every single one, because they couldn't bear the idea of, of their creatures, you know, who they hated, but also extorted money from, going into bed with someone else. And the King of Jerusalem went absolutely bonkers and tried to to hang, um, Walter and his, and his colleagues, and it almost

came to just civil war. Luckily for the Templars, um, poor amoree, or dear amoree, died in the process. Um, the papacy we're just trying to knock a few heads together to stop it getting into civil war, um, but Walter only survived, because because amoree died of dysentery, I think.

which is the Assassinations. I mean, to what extent is this true? They're there branding or stories

“that we're told about them, and the wishes that they've gone on through centuries?”

No, I think it's a lovely one. It's a lovely case study in branding, image, and how that bleeds interledgent. I use the word bleeds, you know, in a, in a very real sense with both of these groups, because their brand was based on blood, really. It is a promise of death that they both

survived by, which, which means that what they did, it's not always obvious how much of it is true,

because they weren't really in a position to deny it, because they rather enjoyed the negative legends. So if you just get back to basics, they both groups had a methodology where the sniper rifle is better than the shotgun. So they both realized that by taking out a main man, you could have a big impact, and they were both impervious to that themselves, because they were corporations, rather than families. Most of the, most of the political bodies around them,

“almost all of them, were family run businesses. There was a warlord, and then his subordinates.”

Exactly. And you got wives, you got nephews. You know, so in the case of Saladin, you know, you got him. He's got a favorite nephew. He's got wives. He's got children. You know, which is great on one level. It's all very cozy. Good at Christmas, but you're very vulnerable. You know, these, this makes you incredibly vulnerable. If you kill Saladin, who knows what happens to the IO bid empire, you kill his nephew, who's, you know, he's thinking about, you know, his real

favorite, then, you know, something really changes, and there's a chance of completely destroying them. Whereas, if you kill the old man of the mountain, there's another one by Tuesday. You know,

it's basically a job title, rather than individual. If you kill the master of the Templars,

they don't care. I mean, you just get a more angry bunch of Templars with a new master by Wednesday morning. So, they, they have this methodology that that exploits other people's weaknesses, but they're not prone to that weakness themselves. And the assassins, the reason why that we talk about assassins, you know, just as much in the Godfather or, you know, sopranos, is because they really

“made an art of it. I don't know, I think it's going too far to say that they invented terrorism”

or they invented political murder because, you know, human beings are horrible. There's been plenty of it. Yeah, exactly. You know, Romans did a lot of it, Greeks did a lot of it, Greeks did a lot of it. I mean, you know, Neero sent a census kill his mum. Well, yeah, you know, that's not very nice, but yeah, but it's been around for since time immemorial, but the assassins were unusual in making it their primary leader. So, Neero, you know, had armies, you know, and he had different

different forms he had projects, he had legions. What the assassins had were a handful of guys with daggers, and they made that work. So, they would go out and kill people sometimes to order,

but nearly always in their own interests as well. By the end, they were kind of being

bossed around less, but they made an art form. So, if they're, for instance, when they're closing up to the rulers of Damascus or Aleppo, when those leaders, one of the levers they have in insinuating themselves into authority, is they can go up to the leader and say, you know, you've got enemies, your enemies can be our enemies. Once their our enemies, they're not going to be around very long, and literally you find that there's some of the most senior people in

the Islamic world are being killed by the, by the assassins. And it's famous, it makes them hated in the SUNY community, because they think they're heretics, but now they're bloody murdering heretics, and they've got this aura of fear around them. So, to the SUNY is, they start creating a kind of negative legend, so they're called Hashashin Assassins, which means, you know, guys who are shrugged up junkies, and it doesn't, I mean, it probably means that you take drugs,

but it's got a broader context. So, it's like, you know, calling somebody a junkie scumbag, you know, it's a very patriotic, socially degrading thing. So, it's a very down market, but also, you know, out of control. You would think from a assassins point of view, that they were rale against that, and they'd do to an extent. But, the other issue is that it's so good for them, you know, it's like, you're enemy fear, you, that's your weapon, and then they start telling

stories about how fierce and horrible you are. It's like, well, you just lean into it. So, the legends kind of build on themselves, even, and it's actually in everybody's interests. So, the heretics are kind of, they become the other, because they have this horrible branding attached

down, that's job done. And, what, I mean, were they particularly good assassins, people? I mean,

“did they sort of, did they train, was it part of their doctrine? Yeah, I mean, sad, we haven't got the,”

you know, the HR manual, we haven't got the, the email trail, but you can look at what they did, and did use from what they did, just how well-trained the guys were. And that's them, to me, that's the main reason why we know they weren't dried up. You know, you can call somebody a, you know, a Shashin, which implies they're on narcotics. And you do that, partly, because that's a way of explaining why they would do such dangerous, almost suicidal things. And it's worth

denigrating them. Whereas in reality, these guys were not drugged up. They were just very devoted to their community and their religion. They were fanatics, you might say, but they were deeply committed. And actually, I found no evidence of drug use with them, particularly. And if you think about it,

“it's the last thing you would want is to be, you know, stoned, when you're going into a particular”

city, thinking about, thinking about, you know, tradition and possible area, where's my next milesbar or something, because you're all, you know, you've done a lot of hashish. These guys needed their wits about them. It's the most intricate assassinations that they're trying to do. And they were spectacular. On a good day, they were spectacularly good at it. What are some of the

greatest hits? Great to set one literally there. Yeah. The first one, really, was spectacular. They

had a spectacular as the IRA used to call them hit in Persia. Right at the very beginning of their campaign against the Turks, they managed to get to the leading warlord of the Turks, who was being, was an older guy being carried to his hurry on a kind of palanquin, I guess.

“And one of the guys in was in disguise as a as a Sufi just managed to get up to him and stabbed him.”

And it sounds incredibly easy, but it politically had just changed everything. And similarly, with even, as I Edward, Edward the first, you know, you can catch someone like Edward the first. It went Edward was in town in 1272. The assassins managed to insinuate their way into his household. So one of the guys managed to get to get to Edward, became a spy. He was actually paid by Edward to be a spy for him. And, and became Edward's gods son. Wow. And then attacked him

in the middle of the night. By surprise, well, he's still in his, you know, principally underwear with his pregnant wife just behind him. And, on one level, it was a failure. So Edward is super about, bit of a James Bond figure. The assassin tries to, tries to knife him in the chest. Edward managed this to push him away, so he only gets wounded on the leg. And then, stabs the assassin in the face, killing him instantly. So you might say, well, that's

pretty pathetic, you know, the assassin had him called, had him unprepared, had him unarmored. He, he should have killed him. And that's true. But even the mere fact of having got to him projected power and fear. And Edward left very soon afterwards, that he, he wrote his will, just a couple of days after that. As soon as he was well enough, and when he recovered from the knife wound and the poison, he wrote his will. You know, he was a guy who was fixated with mortality

because the assassins had got to him once. And, you know, that you extrapolate from that, if they get to me once, they can get to me again, or his family. And that is one of the things

always to bear in mind that a successful assassin hit doesn't have to involve death. It just

involves the possibility of death and getting close enough to administer it. There was a fabulous series of attacks on Saladin. I'm basically the Templars and the assassins both hated Saladin, partly because he was just so good. He was so rich. He was so powerful. He was uniting Sunni Islam and his, his stick really. I mean, Saladin was a, a useurper. So he'd taken command of Egypt, which he shouldn't have done really. I mean, luckily his boss died. But basically he took over

and created an empire as a useurper. And he spent most of his time fighting his Sunni Muslim neighbors. But his PR campaign to justify that was to say, well, if you give me all the power, then I can focus on getting rid of the infidels, who are there, Franks and the Crusaders, and the Heretics, who are the Ashmalis. So instantly, you've got the Templars and the Ashmalis and the

and the real sense of the word, and they both set out to create a series of hits on Saladin.

“You are consuming dance-nose history hits, more after the break.”

And the assassins get pretty close. Well, the legends, there's one about sort of knife in the tent, or something, isn't they? Yeah, oh, it's fabulous. And it's true. I mean, we don't know how many, the, an interestingly, the assassins were involved in a conspiracy to kill Saladin in the, the winter of 1173, 1174. And they were doing that in conjunction with the Crusaders and the Phantomids. So they were getting together. So there's, there's no sense in which they hate the Christians

particularly. They're not, you know, they, you know, like, like Palmstone, they just have interest around them, friends. And in some ways, the Christians are more easy allies for them, because they, they don't care about Muslim theology. To them, the assassins are the assassins. They're not Heretics.

“So they tried that they tried to kill them in 1173, 1174, but the plot gets, gets blown.”

The conspirators are crucified in, this is in Cairo. 1175 Saladin is in a siege doing what he's normally doing, which is attacking his Sunni, Sunni neighbors. He's in a siege of Leppo. And the assassins really go gangbusters to try and get rid of them. You know, because they know that once you've, once you've tried overtly, you know, then you, you very rarely get a good

second chance. And they go in really more pounded. So there's 13 assassins head into the, the siege camp.

And they're really clever. They do it very well. They choose the time right. It's, it's meal time. There's lots of servants, lots of hospital people moving plates around and everything. And they walk very nonchalantly through the camp, looking the part, you know, that's the thing

“about assassins. They don't, they don't have a kind of Hugo boss uniform. They, they are,”

they blend in. That is part of their training. They're very good assimilators. And they just wander into the camp. And the 13 of them, they've all got concealed weapons. And then, just as they're coming up to the tent, somebody calls out. And it's a kind of a query. It's like, "Wow, what are you doing here?" And, you know, if you arrive, we're walking down the street. And somebody said that, you'd think it was, you know, a friend or an acquaintance, you know.

But they don't have any friends. So it's, it's instantly they realise something's gone wrong. And this guy, it's actually an air mere who knows them because he's got land near them. And he's used to,

he knows how dangerous they are. So they've got, I don't know, they've got half a second to make a decision.

They can either run or they can go forward and try and kill Saladin. And, you know, being assassins, you know, they take the, let's kill Saladin approach. And all 13 of them rushed the tent. And it's blood everywhere, blades everywhere. They kill a lot of bodyguards, they kill a mere, they almost get to Saladin. You know, we're talking centimeters. And then, every assassin is butchered. So they come down. They're wiped out. And that's almost the closest

they get to him. But, so Saladin is left, you know, shocked by this. All the security is, is improved. But he, you know, life goes on. And a few months later, he's, he's besieging another Sunni neighbor in Azaz. And they assassins try again. And you, you think they would have given up at this point,

but being the assassin, they never give up. That is part of the brand. You know, they're going to

be around there. You know, they'll take out your grandchildren, you know, if you have any. So three of them, they get a very focused group, three assassins. Again, coming to the siege, siege camp, very well disguised, just nonchalent. They blend in with the bodyguards. And again, they actually do get to Saladin. I don't know if you've done, you've, you've probably seen lots of pictures of Saladin. Normally, he's dressed quite correctly in very gorgeous silks and

a turban and so on. And very, very long, flowing clothes, which is all true. But what the pictures don't show you is what's underneath. And there's layers of male and chain and leather. And on his head, under the beautiful silk turban, there's, on that day, there was a steel cap,

They were trying for his face and neck because they were exposed. And they managed to draw blood.

“But again, they were cut down before they could really get to him and Saladin at that point”

was, you know, understandably, incredibly shaken. We know what he was thinking because we've

still got some first correspondence. But you know, and he was right into his nephew saying,

for God's sake, you know, really watch out. The knives have been distributed. That's a, it's a fine turn of phrase. It's a quote. But you could see he just knew his cards were marked. And he, you know, he's a guy with a huge army, you know, the biggest armors in the region. So he responds by marching straight over to Masia, which is, you know, the big castle that the assassins have got, where the old man is holed up. And they have this kind of, we've still got some of the

correspondence. They have this kind of hate-hate relationship, where they're threatening each other. But the weird thing is, it's so asymmetric that they've really struggled to find a conclusion. So Saladin knows he's got huge armors. And his armors destroy the assassins, villages, they kill the assassins' peasants, burn the trees, do all of that. But they can't really quite guarantee that they're going to kill every single one. And if there's one left, you get a dagger. And similarly

with the assassins, you know, they don't like their villages being burned, and their people killed, and their castles attacked. So they reached a kind of strange impasse. And during the negotiations, the assassins tried another crazy hit. It seems, where one of them was hiding in a walnut tree, where Saladin was riding. So he was, he was habitually riding along this path, there was a walnut tree that he rode under. And the assassin was hiding up in the tree,

jumped down when Saladin rode under. And this is part of the story I love because it does show that they're human as well. And they're a bit rubbish, like ordinary people like us. And instead of getting to Saladin, the guy hit the horse's bottom, and then bounced off, before he was hacked to death, obviously. In the traditional way, but he got in close again. And it's interesting that after that point, there's nothing ever put in writing. And we know Saladin still hates them because

we've got his letters, you know, and he hates him forever. But they never fall out again. There's

“clearly some correspondence missing, which is secret correspondence saying, okay, you know, you back”

off from me, I'll back off from you. And actually when he, when he did treat us with the crusaders, for instance, he included the assassins lands and protected them. So there was clearly some kind of understanding. So to your earlier point, they didn't get to him. Some of the attacks were almost a bit laughable. You know, the horse's bum doesn't go down well. It's not James Bond. But it's the remorseless nature of it. Sort of succeeds because the inculcates a whole sort of atmosphere of

fear and power that they shouldn't have had. They're just, they're just basically a few under-resourced peasants, really. And yet they manage to survive an intimidating. And I guess in the same way, the Templars just make themselves as good at you mentioned before they make themselves really good nights. So if you're facing them badly, you think, oh, at the very least, we're going to fight on our hands here. Yeah, and give you that exact. And that can be half of the battle. So that's just

the perspective. Yeah, absolutely right. And if you look at, if you look at the, the year after, so 1177, the year after, that, that, that assassin bounced off the horse's bottom. The Templars were there doing what the assassins had tried to do. There was, there was a battle called Morghizar that Saladin had invaded the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem with a huge army. And the Crusaders were very intimidated. You know, they hadn't realized how big Saladin's army was.

And when they found out they basically had to hunker down in castles. Over time, over a couple of weeks,

Saladin relaxed because his guys were so in control. He just kind of allowed, allowed discipline to go down a bit and people were out foraging. And the Crusaders came out. They saw they had one chance where his army was quite disorganized. And they managed to face off against Saladin.

“And interestingly, what they did, the army, I think, was commanded by Randall Deschatti, or”

who we can, who's a fabulous character, you know, we've come across him and kind of have any of famous Crusader Pirate. But his elite troops, the ones he put in charge, were the Templars. And there was a single Templars squadron. He was 84 men. Just 84. So they're facing an army of up to 20,000. But these 84 guys, all of whom are Templars, are focused on Saladin's standard.

You know, that's the one time in a battle where you can really take the battle to the

“enemy commanders in a very literal way. And the Templars just launched themselves at Saladin standard.”

And managed to carve their way through. One of the guys got to within a couple of metres of Saladin. He ran. He had a racing camel. He managed to run a way on the battlefield. And his army was

destroyed. They had real trouble getting back to Egypt. They basically disintegrated because it was

November. The weather was awful. And they just got terrified and destroyed over the next 10 days. But it was pretty much the closest the Crusaders ever got to him. And it was a Templar squadron that did it. And it's that same commitment to death. It's the promise of death that is a Templar squadron brings with it. What about decline? Because they both, and like everything, they decline. Yeah, no, absolutely. They clearly, they're very small groups of people. And we're talking in the period

of the Crusades. We're talking about almost 200 years. To me, the weird thing is they both survived as long as they did. But as you say, you know, they did get destroyed or overcome. So the assassins in Persia came across somebody, even nastier and more difficult than themselves, not in the face of the Mongols. So you know, in the 1250s, the Mongols appear in the region. And they are incredibly remorseless. When they first arrived, the assassins were quite pleased.

And they closed up to them and they say, "Oh, there's a nice SUNY town over there. You'd probably like to go and kill." Well, help you with that. So they thought it was an opportunity.

“Because I think they thought anybody who's killing that many SUNY Muslims can't be all bad.”

But then they started to believe their own propaganda, you know, which is always very dangerous.

And one of the Mongols' generals fell out with them. And for his parents, he was, he was butchered by an assassin. So sort of, you know, good full marks for trying. But don't kill them all. Don't kill a Mongols. Don't kill a Mongols. Yeah, exactly. So let's, let's guess what happens next. So the Mongols then go absolutely, do, loudly. And they charge in. And I know the word genocide is heavily overused nowadays. But the Mongols did pretty much a good job of doing it. They went through

the assassins in Persia. And just absolute wiped them out. Women, children, household, animals, you know, domestic pets. It's everything. And they really did destroy the community. The assassins in Syria were kind of left out on the limb, really. I mean, the head office has

“just been taken out. But the Mongols kind of followed them down. In 1260, the Mongols invaded,”

you know, the Latin Kingdom, what was the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 12th century. And they met the Mamluks. There was a huge battle in 1268, a place called Angelute, one of the big ones. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there is this thing where, you know, the idea of the decisive battle is much denigrated. But that was one of them. Exactly. If there ever was one, the Mongols would have finitively turned back. There, you know, their army was absolutely destroyed.

And again, the assassins kind of breathed the sigh of relief. And it's like, oh, fabulous, you know, business is usual now. We've got rid of the Mongols. Now we can go back to intimidating people. But the trouble is anybody nasty enough to beat the Mongols has to be even more dangerous. And that's exactly what happened. There was a Mamluks old town called Bibas. Yeah. It was, it was a superb commander, not a nice guy, you know, not, not holiday companion. But he was, he was really, really tough.

And he basically just put the screws on the assassins. He ended up taking over their carcels,

destroying them. He didn't kill everyone because he was rather more subtle than the Mongols. He realized that they had value. And, and ironically, the value that he saw was the value of their legend, which they'd already tried to promote, which is, you know, I've now got a group of people who will kill for me and will do it on command. And that's exactly what he did. So when we were talking about King Edward, or Prince Edward, as he was then, that was a hit commissioned by Bibas,

because Edward was there with a tiny army. Bibas recognized that he was a superb general. And the last thing he wanted was Edward to go home, get England's resources behind him and then come back with a proper army. And similarly with a lot of the Crusaders, whenever Bibas had a problem with with an enemy, whether it was Muslim or Christian, he would, he would chuck a bit of money, but a small change at the assassins. And so you go and kill that person. And if you kill that

creatures and creatures that survived only by other people's blood. But they made, they did survive.

“Whereas the Templars do not survive, do they? So the Crusaders are kicked out of all the Crusader”

kingdoms. So then the Templars are left giant fundraising apparatus, clever international banking system, lots of property around Europe, but no army to pay for. Yeah, exactly. And they, you know, they are awkward. They are word redundancy. They're a very expect, they're a luxury item

with no job to do anymore. And the first person to realise this was the King of France, Philip,

the Fair, or unfair, as they would say. But it's like they had kind of painted themselves into a corner. You know, the Templars had one job and that was to defend the Holy Land and they, you know, blatantly hadn't done that. And so by 1307, you have a French monarchy who's cash strapped,

“could really do with a bit of, you know, a bit of land, a bit of money. And they also have a”

methodology of intimidating minority groups. So they've already, Philip's already put the screws on,

the local Lombard bankers twice. So they've been accused of crazy things and then had their

money stolen. The Jewish community has been rounded up, had all their money extorted and then then expelled. And after he died actually, his son found a leper conspiracy. He found that lepers have been conspiring with Jews and Muslims to poison the wells of France. You know, all crazy trumped up stuff. But it's a good way. I'm not saying that in a non-moral sense. It was a good way of extorting money from people who were temporarily powerless. And the Templars being redundant

and quite inflexible and a bit arrogant as well fell neatly into that kind of, you know, venn diagram of people I can get money from. And he accused them of doing super crazy things. I satin worship, being traitors to Chris and, you know, a lot of just through everything at it. It was like the biggest tabloid story of the 13th century and just closed the order down. So it's very sad and for the Templars actually because they, you know, they had failed to win the

holy land. I have to say it's an unwindable, you know, that's a corporate objective you couldn't you couldn't fulfill. And they had brought some of it on themselves while being so arrogant.

“But they deserve to be better remembered, you know, the moment we remember them as, you know,”

kind of safe and worshipers and treasure hunters and things which are just childish stories, really. Well, fast, fast things stuff. Thank you so much Steve for coming on to come out. You've just written a book called Assassins and Templars. It's a great story. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Really loved it. Nah, not yet a plane for such a end. Besuch the road kept in a leapness world in Freiburg with

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