← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
The Knights Templar vs the Order of Assassins
00:47:07
Exploring the rivalry between two extraordinary medieval orders and revealing how truth and legend became forever entwined.
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- [00:00]
Dan Snow
Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard iii. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com subscribe.
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- [01:43]
Dan Snow
the Assassins versus the Templars it's the Alien versus Predator of the medieval world. Whoever wins, we lose. One, a group of warrior monks and in white mantles marked with those red crosses sworn 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 Tybalt, to look at these two secretive religious orders that have been immortalized in legend and myth. We've got the Nizari Ishmaelis, 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, unstable, 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 aired it last week. That's your sweeping guide to those. 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.
- [03:27]
Steve Tybalt
Very good to see you, Dan.
- [03:29]
Dan Snow
You've got these two sort of semi mythical, these legendary orders. Did they. They were contemporary with each other. Did they know each other?
- [03:37]
Steve Tybalt
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 Aliens vs. 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. It's incredibly weird and weirdly, I'm guessing,
- [04:05]
Dan Snow
almost quite good for their brand to have a bit of yin and yang going on.
- [04:09]
Steve Tybalt
Yeah, there's definitely that. Um, there's also a kind of interplay between effectively, the. Their methodology, the. The kind of brand they projected, 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, the tiny animal that has a. A display and a. And a kind of killer app that allows them to be much bigger than they really are. And that's. It's wonderful just seeing how these two tiny groups project themselves in history.
- [04:46]
Dan Snow
Branding. Love it. Let's get into the. The backstory. Let's start with the assassins. Where are we? Geography. What. What is their nature?
- [04:55]
Steve Tybalt
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, a historian. 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 mean, 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. The proper name for them was Nizari Ishmaelis. And so they're an offshoot from Ishmaelism. Ishmaelism is an offshoot from Shiism and Shiism is an offshoot from Islam. That's a very simplified version of things, but it does mean that there is a faction of splitters from splitters from splitters. So you can imagine to many mainstream Muslims, particularly Sunni Muslims, they would be seen as heretics. Even mainstream Ishmaelis were 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.
- [06:19]
Dan Snow
And is there, is there a geographical center as well?
- [06:22]
Steve Tybalt
Yes, indeed. So they start off in Egypt where the Fatimid Ishmaelis are. And they, they form in 1094 there's a split. The, their leader Nizar is killed in kind of infighting amongst the Ishmaelis in, 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, they say, no, we're not going to do this. We're going to go with, you know, our line of thinking. And they go off to Persia. So they go all the way from, from Egypt to Persia. And Persia at the time is controlled by Turks who are, who are foreign entrants into the region and they're also Sunnis. So you get this kind of double whammy. So these, these Nizari Ismailis are heretics in, in, in, in Persia, Iran. And they effectively start something that's like the Vietnam War, kind of a nationalist ideological war against their, their Sunni overlords. And in doing so they, they discover two things really. One is that they've got a great methodology, you know, so they are tiny in number. They are hated by everybody. They're surrounded. They don't have the big Turkic armies of, you know, thousands of cavalry. So what do they do? They, they choose the real Darwinistic approach, which is to be fit for purposes. So they're fittest rather than fattest. And they, 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 they, the key thing is they understand that they, that a good, a good sniper is better than a thousand guys with shotguns. And then they move from Persia into Syria, which is where we're mostly going to be talking about. And it's where a lot of the current legends of the Assassins come from. The old man of the mountain is a Syrian Assassin figure. And the characters that appear in Assassin's Creed and, you know, current cultural history are very much from the Syrian Assassin Ishmaeli background.
- [08:44]
Dan Snow
But they're territorially based. They conquer. They sort of have, have castles, they have lands, they collect rent. Do they? I mean, how does that work?
- [08:52]
Steve Tybalt
Yeah, no, that's interesting. So, so in, in, in, in Persia, they have, they carve out 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 tried that a couple of times. Once in Aleppo, once in Damascus. Big, big Muslim cities both times. It works for a while. So they, you know, for, for a few years, they're great mates with the warlord who's in charge. The trouble is, as soon as he dies, suddenly the heretics who are resented, and, 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. 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 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.
- [10:50]
Dan Snow
You're listening to Dan Snow's history. We're gonna be back after this break.
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- [11:38]
Dan Snow
Right, well, let's talk about the Templars. They're sort of slightly warped mirror image on the Christian side of things. So they are, they're not, they're not territorially based, are they?
- [11:51]
Steve Tybalt
They're not in, in some senses they're international. Yeah, but in a way the, the Ishmaelas are international as well. They're, they're an idea that head office is really in northern, northern Persia, I guess, even though most of the action we're talking about is in, in the Holy Land. So the, the Templars bizarrely occupy pretty much the same time and space, in fact so closely that, that they do actually bounce off each other quite a few times. So if you think about it, the Ishmaelas, the, the assassins are created in 1094. Within a few months of that, the First Crusade is 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, the old Christian territories, the old holy 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, you know, a huge piece of luck and it's not really something they could have expected, but they do, they capture Jerusalem, but then most of the lads on the Crusade go home because they need to go home. You know, they've, 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 know, 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 Hospitallers, who are another military order, were an attempt to create this kind of international force. I was going to say peacekeeping force, but it's not like that at all.
- [13:29]
Dan Snow
Almost mercenary, you might say, so sort of fund it, funded from lots.
- [13:34]
Steve Tybalt
Not a national army, not a, it's an international army. It's. I never know really what mercenary means in the Middle Ages, you know, because every, everybody's got, you know, a girl's got to live, so they all need to get paid. But, but they are equally all volunteers and that they're, because they love their religion and their community and they're trying to do the right thing. So bizarrely, you find the Ishmael just at the same time as the Ishmaelis. Nizar Ishmaelis. 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, the Assassins and the Templars were both building castles in 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, they're surrounded by bigger, much bigger Muslim politic politics and they need to punch above their weight. And the thing about the Templars like the Assassins is that they realized 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 methodology. So where, where with the Assassins, you knew that if you, if you pissed 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 there would be somebody there to kill 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 this same extraordinarily effective way of effectively creating a kind of a halo effect. So these small number of guys, through 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 amazing.
- [16:18]
Dan Snow
And the Templars, they could come from all over what we might call Christendom. So all over much of Europe.
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Steve Tybalt
Yeah, absolutely.
- [16:24]
Dan Snow
And then they'd arrive in the Holy Land and there would. But people would also, they'd be fundraisers. People would be passing the hat round from Ireland to Spain, you know, parts of Iberia through right across.
- [16:34]
Steve Tybalt
Yeah.
- [16:35]
Dan Snow
Raising money for the Templars.
- [16:36]
Steve Tybalt
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, relatively small numbers of guys. And in the, in the Eastern Mediterranean, you might say that they're warmongers, you know, the Eastern Mediterranean, these are the guys who are muscular. They're the literally the militant arm of 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, in Western Europe, are lawyers. You know, they're inventing investment banking. They're diplomats, they're schmoozes. You know, they're guys who are peace mongers because the last thing they want is for European powers 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 just shuffle money from the, the west into the east, hence the investment banking.
- [17:28]
Dan Snow
Yeah, people say they invent international banking because. So, so someone in Ireland gives, gives a few coins to the Templars, someone in Jerusalem is able to withdraw that
- [17:41]
Steve Tybalt
from a. Yeah, absolutely. 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, they were far less rich than anybody expected because it was just, you know, it was money going through the bank. But they were often on the verge of bankruptcy because the money was being spent on castles.
- [18:10]
Dan Snow
Expensive business. Expensive business trying to maintain soldiers and castles.
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Steve Tybalt
Those castles are like aircraft carriers. Extraordinary.
- [18:17]
Dan Snow
Okay, so we've got these two groups. Did they, did they, did they. You mentioned that they were extorting money. I mean, did they, did they, did they regard each other as a primary enemy? Or in the ever shifting mosaic of the Holy Land, did they sometimes find themselves on different sides?
- [18:34]
Steve Tybalt
Yeah, no, that's a very good point. The. I think it's. I forget who it was. Who said it? Palmerston maybe, Maybe Salisbury. You know, there was, there was an English Prime Minister who said Her Majesty's Government doesn't have friends, it has interests. And both of these groups are very much like that. So the Assassins, you know, everybody assumes that they're, you know, completely fanatical nutters and against the Crusaders, whereas in reality they often fought on the same side as the Crusaders. They actually allied themselves with the Crusaders in many cases. And in fact there's one wonderful instance where they negotiated so closely with, with the Christians and with King Amalric of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem that they were coming into a very close alliance. The, the Christians even believed that they might becoming 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 know Plato by their bedsides and so on. I mean it's very, it's not impossible that they would have cozed it up. And they were becoming so close that the Templars who were their neighbors and extortionists and landlords, you know, really hated it. And there was, there was an agreement pretty much signed and it was just being brought back to the assassin's castles by their diplomats. And there was a diplomatic convoy coming from, from Jerusalem back into the assassins 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 de Meel, 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 budgeted 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, and tried to, to hang Walter and his and his colleagues. And it almost came to, to civil war. Luckily for the Templars, poor Amalric or dear Amalric died in the process. The Papacy were just trying to knock a few heads together to stop it getting into civil war. But Walter only survived because, because Amalric died of dysentery, I think. Yeah.
- [21:32]
Dan Snow
And, and so we should come on to the assassin, the thing that they're famous for, which is the assassinations. I mean, to what extent is this true or is it their branding or is it just stories that were told about them and the whispers that have gone on through centuries.
- [21:45]
Steve Tybalt
No, I think it's a lovely one. It's a lovely case study in branding image and how that bleeds into legend. I use the word bleed, you know, in a, in a very real sense with, with both of these groups because their brand was based on blood really. It is a, a promise of death that they both survived by which, which means that what they did is 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, 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.
- [22:44]
Dan Snow
There was a, there was a warlord and then his subordinates.
- [22:47]
Steve Tybalt
Exactly. And you've got wives, you've got nephews, you know, say in the case of Saladin, you know, you've 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, 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 Ayyubid 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. He, you know, it's basically a job title rather than an 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 have this methodology that exploits other people's weaknesses, but they're not prone to that weakness themselves. And the assassins, the reason why we talk about assassins, you know, just as much in the Godfather or you know, Sopranos is, 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.
- [24:00]
Dan Snow
There's been plenty of it.
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Steve Tybalt
Yeah, exactly. You know, Romans did a lot of it, Greeks did a lot of it. I mean, you know, Nero sent assassins
- [24:06]
Dan Snow
to kill his mum.
- [24:07]
Steve Tybalt
Well, yeah, you know, that's, 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 lever. So Nero, you know, had armies, you know, and he had different, different forms. He had praetorians, 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 a little bit. We'll come to that later. But they made an art form. So for instance, when they're cozying 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 they're our enemies, they're not going to be around very long. And literally you find that some of the most senior people in the Islamic world are being killed by the assassins. And it's famous, it makes them hated in the Sunni 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 Sooners, they start creating a kind of negative legend. So they're called Hashashin Assassins, which means, you know, guys who are drugged up junkies. And it doesn't, I mean, it partly means that you take drugs, but, but it's got a broader context. So it's like, you know, calling somebody a junkie scumbag, you know, it's a very pejorative, socially degrading thing. So it's very down market, but also, you know, out of control. You would think from an assassin's point of view that they would rail against that. And they do to an extent. But the other issue is that it's so good for them. You know, it's like your enemy fear you, that's your weapon. And then they start telling stories about how fearsome and horrible you are. It's like, well, you just lean into it. So the, 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 to them. But from their perspective, well, you know, if that means you leave me alone, then that's job done.
- [26:41]
Dan Snow
And I mean, were they particularly good at assassinating people? I mean, did they. So did they train? Was it part of their doctrine?
- [26:49]
Steve Tybalt
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 deduce from what they did just how well trained the guys were. And that's the, to me, that's the main reason why we know they weren't drugged up. You know, you can call somebody a hash, you know, hashashin, 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 a way of denigrating them. Whereas in reality, these guys were not drugged up. They were just very devoted to their community and their religion. They were, they were fanatics, you might say, but they were deeply committed. And actually I found no evidence of, 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 meticulous heading about thinking about, you know, mission impossible. Yeah, where's. Where's my next Miles bar or something? Because you're all, you know, you've done a lot of hashish. These, 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.
- [28:06]
Dan Snow
What are some of the greatest hits?
- [28:07]
Steve Tybalt
Greatest? Well, literally they are. Yeah. The, the first one really was, was spectacular. They had a spectacular, as the IRA used to call them, hit in, in Persia right at the very beginning of their, of their campaign against the Turks. They, they, they managed to get to the, the leading warlord of the Turks, who was being, it was an older guy being carried to his harem on a kind of palanquin, I guess. And one of the guys 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, it just changed everything. And similarly, with even say, Edward, Edward the. You know, you can get someone like Edward the First. When Edward was in, 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 godson and then attacked him in the middle of the night by surprise while he's still in his, you know, princely underwear with his pregnant wife just behind him. And on one level, it was a failure. So. So Edward is super butcher, bit of a James Bond figure. The assassin tries to. Tries to knife him in the chest. Edward manages 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 cold, had him unprepared, had an unarmored. 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. He wrote his will just a couple of days after that. As soon as he was well enough. When he recovered from the knife wound and the poison, he wrote as well. 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. 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, and 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 shtick, really. I mean, Saladin was a usurper, so he'd taken command of Egypt, which he shouldn't have done, really. Luckily, his boss died, but basically he took over and created an empire as a usurper. 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 the Franks and the Crusaders and the heretics who are the Ishmaelis. So instantly you've got the Templars and the Ishmaelists, and the assassins suddenly have a commonality of purpose. They both got a nemesis. I mean, it is a nemesis in the real sense of the word. And they both set out to. To create a series of hits on Saladin.
- [31:48]
Dan Snow
You are consuming Dan Snow's history Hit more after the break.
- [31:55]
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- [32:30]
Dan Snow
And the assassins get pretty close. Well, the legends, there's one about sort of a knife in the tent or something, isn't there?
- [32:35]
Steve Tybalt
Yeah. Oh it's, it's fabulous and it's true. I mean we don't know how many the, and interestingly the assassins were involved in a conspiracy to kill Saladin in, in the winter of 70, 1173, 1174. And they were doing that in conjunction with the Crusaders and the Fatimids. 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 Palmerston. They just have interests rather than 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 try, they try to, to kill him 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 Aleppo and the assassins really go gangbusters to try and get rid of him, you know, because they know that once you've, once you've tried overtly, you know, then you very rarely get a good second chance. And they go in really mob handed. 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 mealtime, there's lots of servants, lots of hustle bustle, 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 have a kind of Hugo Boss uniform. They blend in. That is part of their training. They're very good assimilators. And they just wander into the camp and there's 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 or I were 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 realize something's gone wrong. And this guy, it's actually an emir who knows them because he's got lands 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. They take the let's kill Saladin approach, and all 13 of them rush the tent and it's blood everywhere, blades everywhere. They kill a lot of bodyguards. They kill emirs. They almost get the 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 the assassins try again. And you'd think they would have given up at this point, but being the assassins, they never give up. That is part of the brand, you know, that 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 come into the siege, siege camp, very well disguised, just nonchalant. They blend in with the bodyguards, and again, they actually do get to Saladin. I don't know if you. Dan, 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 mail and chain and leather. And on his head, under the beautiful silk turban, there's. On that day, there was a steel cap. And underneath that is mail, and underneath that is leather. And the assassins still managed to get to him. 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. He. We know what he was thinking because we've still got some of his correspondence. But, you know, and he was writing to his nephew saying, for God's sake, you know, really Watch out. The, 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, he knew his cards were marked. And he, you know, he's, he's, he's a guy with a huge army, you know, the biggest armies in the region. So he responds by marching straight over to Mazyaf, which is, you know, the big castle that the Assassins have got, 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 really struggle to find a conclusion. So Saladin knows he's got huge armies, and his armies 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 burnt and their people killed and their castles attacked. So they reached a kind of strange impasse during the negotiations. The assassins tried another crazy hit, it seems, where one of them was hiding in a walnut tree where, 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, 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, you know, 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, and it's interesting that after that point, there's nothing ever put in writing. And we know Saladin still hates him because we've got his letters, you know, and he hates them 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 treaties with the Crusaders, for instance, he included the Assassin's lands and protected them. So there was clearly some kind of understanding. So to your earlier point, it. They didn't get to him. Some, some of the attacks were almost a bit laughable. You know, the horse's Bum doesn't, doesn't go down well. It's not James Bond, but it's the remorseless nature of it sort of succeeds because it 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 and intimidate.
- [40:08]
Dan Snow
And I guess in the same way the Templars just make themselves as good. As you mentioned before, they make themselves really good knights. So if you're facing in battle, you think, oh, at the very least we're going to fight on our hands here.
- [40:18]
Steve Tybalt
Yeah.
- [40:19]
Dan Snow
And that can be half the battle sometimes not to fight you.
- [40:23]
Steve Tybalt
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And if you look at, if you look at the, the year after, so 1177, the year after 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 Mon Gizar where Saladin had invaded the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem with a huge army. And the, the Crusaders were very intimidated. You know, they, they hadn't realized how, 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 it, allowed discipline to, 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, and they managed to face off against Saladin. And, and interestingly what they did, the army, I think was commanded by Reynal de Chatillon, who we can, who's a fabulous character that, you know, we've come across him in Kingdom of Heaven, you know, famous Crusader pirate. But, but his, his elite troops, the ones he put in charge were the Templars. And there was a single Templar squadron. It 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 Standard. You know, they can see it and there's something very deeply personal about it. 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 meters of Saladin. He ran, he, he had a racing camel. He managed to run away on the battlefield. And his army was, was destroyed. They had real trouble getting back to Egypt. They basically disintegrated because it was November, the weather was awful, and they, they just got, 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. It's that same, it's that same commitment to death, it's the promise of death that a Templar squadron brings with it.
- [42:45]
Dan Snow
What about decline? Because they both like everything. They declined.
- [42:49]
Steve Tybalt
Yeah, no, absolutely. They, 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, they did get destroyed or overcome. So the, the assassins in, 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 arrive, the assassins are quite pleased and they cozy up to them and they say, oh, there's, you know, there's a nice Sunni town over there you'd probably like to go and kill, you know, and we'll help you with that. So they thought it was an opportunity because I think they thought anybody who's killing that many Sunni 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 Mongol generals fell out with them, and for his pains, he was. He was butchered by an assassin.
- [43:59]
Dan Snow
Oh.
- [44:00]
Steve Tybalt
So sort of, you know, good. Full marks for trying, but don't kill them, don't call them. Yeah, exactly. So let's, let's guess what happens next. So the Mongols then go absolutely do lightly, 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, the assassins in, in Persia and just absolutely wiped them out. Women, children, household animals, you know, domestic pets, it's everything. And they really did destroy the community. The, the assassins in Syria were kind of left out on a limb, really. I mean, they like head office has just been taken out. But the Mongols kind of followed them down. In 1260, the Mongols invaded what, 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 1260 at a place called Angelut, one of the big ones.
- [45:05]
Dan Snow
Truly decisive battle.
- [45:07]
Steve Tybalt
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 were definitively turned back. You know, their army was absolutely destroyed. And again, the assassins kind of breathed a sigh of relief and it's like, oh, fabulous. You know, business as 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, it has to be even, even more dangerous. And that's exactly what happened. There was a, A, A Mamluk sultan called Baibars. Yeah, he was, he 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 castles, destroying them. He didn't kill everyone because he was rather more subtle than the Mongols. He realized that they had value. 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 Barbara's because Edward was there with a tiny army. But Baibars 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 Baibars had a problem with, with a, 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 say, you go and kill that person, and if you kill that person, I'll let your community live for a couple more years. So it's a sad ending. They became creatures and creatures that survived only by other people's blood. But they made, they did survive.
- [47:10]
Dan Snow
Whereas the Templars do not survive, do they? So, so the, 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.
- [47:22]
Steve Tybalt
Yeah.
- [47:22]
Dan Snow
But no army to pay for.
- [47:24]
Steve Tybalt
Yep, exactly. And, you know, awkward. The R word. Redundancy. They're, they're, they're a very expensive. They're a luxury item with no job to do anymore. And the first person to realize 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, that 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 whose cash strapped could really do with a bit of, you know, a bit of land, bit of money. And they also have a methodology of intimidating minority groups. So they've already, Phillips 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, and then expelled. And after he died, actually his son found a leper conspiracy. He found that lepers had been conspiring with Jews and Muslims to poison the wells of France. You know, all crazy trumped up stuff. But it's a good, they've a good way. I mean, I said 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 sort of, you know, Venn diagram of people I can get money from. And he, he accused them of doing super crazy things like Satan worship, being traitors to Christendom. You know, a lot of just threw everything at it. It was like the biggest tabloid story of the 13th century and just closed the order down. So it was a very sad end for the Templars actually, because they, you know, they had failed to win the Holy Land. I have to say. It's an unwinnable, you know, that's a corporate objective you couldn't, you couldn't fulfill. And they had brought some of it on themselves by being so arrogant. But they deserve to be better remembered. You know, at the moment we remember them as, you know, kind of Satan worshippers and treasure hunters and things which are just childish stories really.
- [49:37]
Dan Snow
Wow, fascinating stuff. Thank you so much, Steve, for coming on, talking about you've just written a book called Assassins and Templars. I. It's a great story. Thanks for coming on.
- [49:47]
Steve Tybalt
Thank you, Dan. Really loved it.
- [50:09]
Dan Snow
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