History Extra Podcast Host (2:08)

The Assassins and the Knights Templar are two of history's most intriguing, enigmatic and legendary groups. While they may seem vastly different on the surface, their intertwined stories reveal a surprising number of parallels, from an almost fanatical strategy to the nature of their downfall. Speaking to Emily Briffett, Dr. Steve Tibble compares their stories and reveals what these two organisations can tell us about medieval conflict, religion and power, and why they continue to captivate us today.

Emily Briffett (2:36)

Thank you so much for joining me today to talk all about your new book, Assassins and A Battle in Myth and Blood. Now the Assassins and Templars have become two of the most legendary historical groups in modern times. In your book, you speak about this huge deadweight of mythology and conspiracy theories that enshroud them and some of this you've spoken about on one of our other podcasts, History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories. So some of that will be covered in that episode and listeners can go and listen to that. But for this episode, for listeners who might not be familiar with these two groups, what is some of this mythos?

Dr. Steve Tibble (3:19)

Yeah, that's a very, very good point. And for me, it was the starting point for writing the book and why I enjoyed it so much was being able to investigate what makes a legend. They're the underdogs of their period, and yet everybody's forgotten about all the big armies they were facing. But these tiny groups reverberate through the centuries and they capture our imagination. And the other wonderful thing about that is how adaptable they are. We see ourselves in them, and every generation reinvents the Templars and reinvents the assassins. You can learn a lot about ourselves by seeing what we want to project onto groups like that. But the other really weird thing that got me started on it was the fact that these two tiny groups, ostensibly from opposite ends of the kind of cultural spectrum, actually had not just so much in common, but they actually bounced off each other. They had weird relationships that were to do with blood and violence, but they were also boring, prosaic relationships around landlord, tenants, and, you know, negotiating rental agreements. It's crazy stuff, and it's just wonderful to see how the tiny impact of a small group of people in nearly a thousand years ago still creates reverberations in entertainment, in games, in books, in cinema. Wherever you look, there are these guys reflecting themselves and what we think about ourselves.

Emily Briffett (4:53)

Actually, it's a wonderful introduction to this topic, Steve. Now we're going to be talking about these two groups. Templars. Assassins. The Templars, I think, I don't know, somewhat have more resonance somewhere. Assassins. Even though they're a big name, there's almost less familiarity about what they are. So we're not just talking about any old assassin here. We're talking about the assassins. Would you mind introducing them to us? Who actually are they?

Dr. Steve Tibble (5:23)

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, the big thing to remember is this is assassin with an uppercase a. Assassins with a lowercase a have become a byword for just murderers. So what we're looking at is the mother load of where that word comes from, which is the assassins, uppercase A. The people who invented political murder. Now, clearly political murders have been going on as long as, you know, monkeys like us have learned how to carry weapons. But it is true that they took the art of political Murder to a. You know, to a level of sophistication. And I think it's important to see them as they would see themselves. It's very easy to look at them from the outside and just paint them as a caricature. Evil murderers, terrorists. You know, once you start bandying words like that around, you've kind of shut down the conversation and you've stopped looking at them for what they are. What I've tried to do, and which is actually much more fun, is to look at it from their perspective. Their most famous leader was a guy called Sinan, who, you know, if you've played Assassin's Creed, you'll be aware of him. It's a fantasy game, obviously, and they wouldn't pretend otherwise, but it does have a very interesting correlation to events in the 1190s in the Middle east, including real characters like Sinan. He was being bullied by a guy who had armies of tens of thousands of men. This huge general was castigating Sinan for being an evil bully. And Sinan, quite without irony, said, we are the oppressed, not the oppressors. And it's a very blunt statement, and I had to read it a few times before I understood it. From their perspective, they are a religious minority that's oppressed, persecuted, viewed by the outside world, primarily by the outside Islamic world, as being heretics. So from their perspective, they were a tiny group fighting for their survival in the only way that they could. Having a big army is great if you're a big state and, you know, you can punch it out. But for small groups, you have to either punch clever or get kicked over. And that's really the story of the Crusades. All the smaller groups get given a good kicking and disappear, except for one or two like the Templars and the Assassins, who develop their own really unique sort of approach. They have a methodology for survival that doesn't rely on bulk numbers. It actually transfers the idea of delivering death from a cavalry charge of 10,000 men to a hit squad or a cavalry squadron of just a few men, but men who are totally committed. They're not suicide squads, but they're men who are not scared to die and who are so ideologically committed that they're prepared to be martyrs for their cause.

Emily Briffett (8:14)

And before we really get into their skill set, just a quick side note here. What were their origins? Where and when did they appear?

Dr. Steve Tibble (8:22)

Yes, funnily enough, Assassins and Templars have an extraordinarily parallel existence and birth as well. We tend to think of both of them as being Very, very ancient and, you know, arcane back into the mists of time and everything. In reality, at the time of the First Crusade, you know, they were both just about to set foot on the stage with the Templars. You know, you've got the First Crusade going over, and then there's an immediate manpower crisis. So at that point, people start thinking about how to create a standing army. And the Templars who come into being at around about 11, 19, 11, 20, are the military Order. They're the kind of little military standing army that sticks. You know, there have been other attempts in the run up to doing that, but they come out of this kind of crisis of. Of the early 12th century. Ironically, the assassins, I doubt they knew anything about each other at the time, were running on an almost identical chronology. I mean, it's just extraordinary. So First Crusade sets off in 1095, 1094, you know, the other side of the Mediterranean, thousands of miles away, events are kicking off in Egypt, where the Fatimid dynasty is. Is going to go through a kind of religious, almost a civil war, where one part of the Shiite government of Egypt, the caliph, dies and his son, who's going to take over, is called Nizar the Vizier, who's the kind of guy in charge of the army. And the government thinks that that's not a terribly good idea because Nizar's a man who's got his own thoughts. So he tries to go for the younger brother who's very malleable. There's civil war breaking out, and you find that Ishmaelism, the Fatimid Egypt was an Ishmaeli state, which in turn is a branch of Shiite Islam, then split itself. And the guys who followed Nizar went into civil war. They lost the civil war, but instead of lying down and, you know, doing the decent thing and just getting killed, they escaped with the Ishmaelas. In Persia, they set up their own group of Nizari Ishmaelis, who we now call Assassins. And hopefully we can talk about what the word assassin means in a minute. In a sense, it's. So the Nizari Ishmaelis, the Assassins are splitters from a splitter. From a splitter. You know, they were very unpopular in an Islamic world that was itself quite fragmented, but it meant that they weren't even popular with a lot of other Shiites, but they were certainly not popular with the majority Sunnis, who did see them as heretics. So you've got people who are deeply engaged with their religion, but they're on such a A limb that they're fighting for their lives the whole time. It's not Stockholm syndrome, but it's the equivalent where external pressures push everybody into such a position that if you are part of that group and you know that you're in. In such dangerous position, everybody hates you. And you commit. Once you've committed, you're like the hardest stone, you know. And. And that ideology created a kind of brand of extremism. The key thing about a brand is the promise. And the wonderful thing about the Templars and the assassins, particularly the Assassins, was they intuitively had this fabulous grasping of branding. And that if you can translate that promise into a promise of death and hit the right people, you'll actually be able to achieve a lot more with hitman squad of three people armed with tiny daggers than if you had 10,000 men launching a cavalry charge. It's just a very impressive kind of anthropological development.

Emily Briffett (12:00)

So we're really talking about relatively minor players on a massive field competing against larger, wealthier stakeholders, I guess. But first tell us, before we get into the real skill set side of this and how they've managed to play the field, as it were, tell us about where that assassin's name came from.

Dr. Steve Tibble (12:20)

So the assassins didn't call themselves assassins. They were called assassins by their enemies. And the reason they were called assassins was it was a derogatory term. It literally means hashashin. So somebody who's addicted to hashish. And that would be, in the kind of Sunni parlance of the time. It's not necessarily just about drugs. It's kind of like saying you're a junkie scumbag. You may literally be a drug addict, but it doesn't mean you are literally a drug addict. It means you are the lowest of the low, people that you wouldn't want to hang out with. It also had a kind of secondary benefit if you're a Sunni. So primary benefit is that you manage to label your enemies as the lowest of the low in the same way as calling them a terrorist would immediately give them a label of something derogatory. The secondary aspect that it really helps with is it helps to denigrate their hit squads. The way in which the assassins projected power was through the commitment of and fanaticism and skills of their assassin teams. You know, the guys who would go out and find the most hard to get most powerful men in the world and then would then kill them against all the odds. They were called the Fidus. When we talk about assassins, very often we are actually talking about Fidias. Tiny number of guys, hugely committed. But by saying that they were drugged up, so you were basically saying, well, these guys, they do crazy, foolish, awful things and they do it because they are almost subhuman. They're under the influence of narcotics. They're just kind of patsies who are drugged up. In reality, I couldn't find any evidence of drug use at all. And I think common sense would argue against it anyway. The intricacy of the assassinations they undertook was so exquisite and so powerful that the last thing you want is to be, you know, having narcotics before you go into it. You need all your wits about you to be a proper assassin. So that was part of the branding, and it was part of the branding that was imposed on them by their enemies. But, and I think this is where history comes together in a fine way. I think to a large extent, the assassins embraced that. They found that actually being feared and hated and called, you know, assassins, you know, unstoppable, actually helped them a lot because it gave them leverage and it was a multiplier effect. I mean, we don't know how many fideus there ever were at any given time, but I'd say it's in double figures rather than not even hundreds. The most I think I've ever seen in one place was possibly 13. But mostly their hit squads are three man, four man teams. It made them more powerful. People were playing into their hands, creating their own mythos. Fear is what got them into places when nothing else would have done for a group their size.

Emily Briffett (15:15)

So we can totally throw out this perception that they're these drugged up fanatics eager to die for like a quite twisted cause. We can say that actually that legend that builds up, that fear gives them power and that actually that's quite a valuable legend to have. Could you tell us about their skill set, some of the stories about how they deployed those skills as well?

Dr. Steve Tibble (15:42)

The bad news is we haven't got any of their training manuals. We haven't got no email trails. But it is clear from what they did, from the methodology that they were very good at blending in. And it's a nightmare finding good images of them. The whole point is you don't know what an assassin looks like. He could be somebody behind you at any point. He could be your best friend, he could be one of your servants, or he could just, he could be a beggar in the street. There's no uniform that you can go on. They clearly had a lot of linguistic and empathetic skills. You quite often find assassin teams would Be sleepers, as in the Cold War, you know, where people would be infiltrated into another society. They would sit there for many years just waiting for the activation and somebody to tell them what the job was. And that does seem to be the case. Often there'd be a particular, say a particular person and then the assassins would be infiltrated into his household. They'd be trusted. And they could do that with the Crusaders and with their other Muslim enemies. There were stories, you never know quite how true these things are that there were assassins in Saladin's household, but they also managed to get into crusader households. They even managed to get into the household of one of the, you know, the great English kings, you know, Edward the First Longshanks had a trusted assassin working for him as a spy. I mean, that which is brilliant. I always think it's wonderful. You know, the best cover for a spy is as a spy. They must have been the opposite of a drugged up junkie, as in, they must have been smart, intelligent, having something to add. You know, they were, they were people you wanted to have around you just for clarity. And the same as with the Templars, they were not suicide squads. There was nearly always an escape plan for a fideus squad going in. That's not to say that they weren't prepared to die or that they didn't normally die, but again, it's the fact that they were supposedly suicide squads. It was part of the insult. I think your life is worthless so you throw it away. That was the opposite of the case, actually. The Fidus and the Templar Knights were a very scarce resource. And although they were prepared to die and that was part of their value, everybody wanted them to survive because, you know, they didn't want it to be just a one off weapon. And both Templars and Assassins were memorialized by their people. They were celebrated for their jobs, having done a great job for their religion, for their community, and having stood up for their people and been prepared to sacrifice themselves. But it was seen as sacrifice rather than suicide.

Emily Briffett (18:17)

So arguably this skill set actually sounds, if anything actually pretty terrifying on its own. Forget the legend that goes around it. Tell us about that relationship with Saladin, that hate, hate relationship.

Dr. Steve Tibble (18:30)

Yes. No, you're absolutely right. That's the thing about a good legend is it's based on truth. That's not to say that the whole thing is true, but you can see where it came from. You can see the germs of it. One wonderful part of the legend that survived, and it features very heavily in the video game Assassin's creed is the interplay between Saladin, you know, who is a larger than life character in the Crusades, and particularly from a European perspective because of his role in destroying the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and then fighting the Third Crusade, and Richard the Lionheart and so on. There's a very real, very personal relationship between the Assassins and Saladin. And it's full of irony and adventure and action. It's a bit like Day of the Jackal, the original one, where you've got de Gaulle having hit after hit after hit organized against him. And Saladin had pretty much the same relationship with the assassins. Saladin, as you know, he's a Kurdish sort of entrepreneur really, who's managed to take over a lot of the Muslim world, but he's a Sunni Muslim. And part of his shtick to try and justify his regime because he's a usurper, he was know, rebelling against his. His employer, Neural. Then part of his justification for doing that was to be the guy who's standing up for Sunni Islam. So the Crusaders and the Assassins were natural enemies, and they were naturally a big part of his propaganda campaign. The Assassins were deeply worried about Saladin, quite rightly, because under Saladin, you've got all the. The money and the resources of Egypt, you've got Syria, even as far as Yemen. You know, a lot of the Islamic world is united under a very good Sunni general whose top of his agenda is, after he's eliminated his Sunni rivals, is is to give heretics like the Assassins and infidels like the Crusaders a good kicking. So both the Crusaders and the Assassins were deeply suspicious, quite rightly, of what Saladin meant to them. For really, he was their worst nightmare because he hugely outnumbered them. He surrounded them and, you know, he had the power to destroy all of them. Now, the Assassins naturally took that kind of personally. And their leader at the time was dear Sinan. So again, you have these two characters from Assassin's Creed fighting things out. Saladin took over in Egypt in 1169. And it seems almost immediately that the Assassins understood what that could mean. And particularly as Saladin grew in power, they understood that they could be surrounded and destroyed. So they started to negotiate their first hit on him, which we think was around about 1174. There was a conspiracy in Egypt and they were part of it. Ironically, the Crusaders were part of it as well. That's one of the wonderful things about this story is, you know, the people you think diametrically opposed enemies, they do come together when they've got a common cause. In 1175, you find Saladin attacking another one of his Sunni rivals in Aleppo. And he's in a siege camp outside. And the assassins really go for it. This is the incident where up to 13 fidas appear at the same time. So Saladin's in his camp. The Fidaeus waits until he's sitting down for supper. You know, it's all the hubbub, everybody's trying to relax, a lot noise, lots of strangers wandering around. And these 13 guys, ostensibly unarmed, just wander in to the camp, make for the tent, looking like they're, you know, they could be auxiliaries, it could be mercenaries, or they could be merchants or whatever. Luckily for Saladin, somebody recognizes them. Someone shouts out, you know, oi, what are you doing here? At that point, all hell breaks loose, you know, because they've got. They've got half a second to choose either do they try and talk it out, which they can't really, or do they just go, hell for leather? And then they choose the latter and just go straight for Saladin, into his tent, kill a lot of his guards, kill a lot of his emirs. Every single one dies fighting. And they do get to Saladin, they draw blood. The protection that these guys had, it wasn't, you know, someone like Saladin wouldn't just have the protection of, you know, 20, 30 bodyguards. He is covered pretty much head to toe in armor and very good quality armor and layers of armor. So when you see these portraits of, say, of Saladin, and pretty much all you see is his face and hands and everything else is beautiful silks. That's true up to a point. But what's underneath the beautiful silks is mail plate, you know, akhton, the whole. The whole lot. So these guys are like walking in armor the whole time, partly because they know the assassin can get them. So you find the assassins increasingly go for very vulnerable areas. They come back a year later. Here, Saladin's doing the same thing. He's giving a good kicking to another Sunni rifle at Azaz, and he's in a siege camp. And this time a smaller number. I think three or four fedeas turnout. But they really go for these specific points that you would imagine are vulnerable. So that would be your face, your neck, and in some cases not with Saladin, but in some cases, if the target is wearing trousers, you know, there's a. A slight vulnerability around the groin because you have a male shirt, and you can imagine you have armor going up your legs. But there's that one kind of delta of Vulnerability, where a skilled assassin with a dagger can really do something very painful. So again, they go at Saladin and they draw blood. And it's pretty close, actually. Very close. But Saladin survives. I mean, he is actually an incredibly lucky man. He was a good general, but he was, as Napoleon would say, the. The best kind is a lucky general. And he really was. He survived yet another. So that was his third, arguably his third assassin's attempt. Managed to get away. Bleeding quite heavily. And Saladin is very, very moved, very scared by this. He fires a lot of his bodyguards. So Saladin, at this point has had enough, and it's become personal. If you have a big army, it's a huge blunt instrument, and it kind of lumbers around doing ghastly things. But the assassins are the kind of needle. They're the kind of sniper shot. They've understood that if you can get to a key player or his wife or his children, any other members of his family, you can leverage more power than you have with a huge cavalry army. And Saladin was. Was scared by this. Obviously, he was worried about his family, he was worried about himself. So he moved his entire army to besiege Sinan at Mazyaf. Again, you know, Mazyaf, which is one of the backgrounds for Assassin's Creed. So you can kind of envisage what it might have been like. And then it gets really weir. It seems as though they then started going into negotiations. It's one of those points in time where you get warfare that is so asymmetric and so unbalanced that everybody is scared. So the assassins wanted to get rid of this huge army, but how do they really do that? Saladin's got a huge army, but he can't actually stop these guys potentially killing his favorite nephew or his wife, so. Or whatever. So both of them are very nervous and they dance around this. And around about this time, it appears there's a lot of evidence that there was at least one other assassin attack as well, which was a kind of embarrassing one that didn't end well. And it either took place in Damascus or just outside Masyaf, where an assassin was hiding in a tree. I don't believe the details, but I'll tell them anyway because that's all we've got. And Saladin was riding underneath the tree he regularly rode under on his horse, and the assassin jumped and fell on him, but missed and got the horse's bottom instead. So I think there may be a bit of a sort of black joke there, trying to insult the assassins Again, but also after all this very personal violence, you know, so Saladin is destroying Assassin villages. The Assassins are trying to kill him or his family. Couldn't be more personal. And at the end of it, they sign an agreement. And the next time he signs a peace treaty with the Crusaders, he makes a point of saying, okay, you know, you can't go into my lands, I won't go into your lands. And by the way, you've got to make sure the Assassins are safe and nobody does anything to them. So these two personally brutalized enemies in that short period of time came to some form of understanding. And you can see that basically there was an impasse. You know, Sinan promised, I imagine, not to kill Saladin or his family. Saladin promised to look after their interests against the Crusaders or whatever. And there was this very uneasy kind of truce that lasted until they both died. We know that Saladin continued to hate the Assassins because we've got some of his letters, quite a lot of his letters actually. Every now and then they, they refer to the Assassins as, you know, major scum and what have you. So it's not a relationship that's ever based on love, but it's a way of rubbing along together. And it just about holds until, you know, 1193, where it's ironically, again, Sinan and Saladin both died almost at the same time.

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Emily Briffett (28:17)

By the mid 12th century, we've actually got a more established base for the Assassins and we've got, I guess, more established leadership as well. Is that fair to say?

Dr. Steve Tibble (28:28)

Yes. No, that's very true, very true. As we were discussing, you know, when the Fatimid Empire split and the Nizari Ishmaelists split away from Cairo, they were based in Persia and their headquarters were Alamut. And it was from there that they were launching attacks against the Sunni Turkic Muslims who'd conquered most of Persia. So in, in Persia, they had very much the attributes of a kind of nationalist uprising. But in the early 12th century, around about the same time that the Templars were being formed, they sent missionaries out to Syria and particularly to Aleppo, Damascus and the mountain ranges of Lebanon, and set up their own communities there and many, many castles, and gradually formulated a very carefully structured hierarchy and leadership, which ironically was Very often at odds with the Persian guys. Even with a sect like this, you know, which is a splitter from a splitter from a splitter, there was always the tendency for the Syrian Ishmaelis, the Assyrian Assassins, to split from the Persian Assassins. And in fact, Sinan, who was the real iconic, fabulous leader of the Assassins in Syria, was the subject of an assassination attempt on multiple occasions by assassins sent from Alamut. And actually, as a sign of what a strangely charismatic and compelling person he was, on every occasion he either managed to kill the people, the assassins who were trying to kill him, or by talking to them, he converted them so that they became his fideus rather than Alamut's fideus. He was, yeah, he was a scary guy, but a very, very impressive one.

Emily Briffett (30:10)

So we've spoken about the relationship with Saladin. The relationship that we should now talk about is the assassin's relationship with the Templars. The Assassin's Creed games would have us believe that these two groups were locked in this battle through time. How often did these groups actually interact and were they really rivals?

Dr. Steve Tibble (30:34)

Obviously, it's all true. Now the good thing about Assassin's Creed is this lovely game and it doesn't pretend to be a history lecture, so, you know, you can't criticize it for being something that it's not. The wonderful thing about it though is it does incorporate some of these historical groups, historical characters and some of their relationships to actually resonate with what actually happened. The relationship between the Assassins and the Crusaders in general and the Templars in particular, was bizarrely amicable. Sometimes it's one of those funny things where I love it because it just forces you to reassess every, all your cliches about the Crusades and you know, how one religious fanatic could not possibly be friends with another. And pretty much from the get go, the Assassins were not ill disposed towards the Crusaders. Bizarrely, they never really had a problem ideologically with Christians. And in some strange ways they were much more open minded than say Catholic Christianity or Sunni Islam. So for instance, there were several times there were big massacres of Assassins in Aleppo or Damascus. And when I say assassins, this would be the whole Ishmaeli, Nizari, Ishmaeli community. Big massacres, hundreds, thousands of the community being killed. They would quite often flee to Christian territory and find refuge there. And we know of instances where they would set up shrines in a Christian castle and the garrison would be happy to have them come back. And even of Sinan's predecessors was actually buried in a Christian castle. We know that his assassin chums used to come and pay homage and pay their respects to him. And the Christian garrison was happy to do that. It sounds illogical and counterintuitive, but the profound logic is that the Christians really didn't have any interest in Islamic infighting other than the fact that it might be occasionally useful. They didn't have an ideological sort of theological problem with the assassins at all. So the assassins were hated more certainly theologically by their Sunni neighbors than they were by the Christians, who I guess, just saw them as more of the same. You find their instances where assassins have small armies fighting alongside crusaders. I mean, if you look at the roll call of major hits, you know, it is like the kind of Jason Bourne thing, you know, there's a huge number of hits going on at any given point, but the vast majority are against fellow Muslims. They weren't singling out Christians. In fact, quite the opposite when Christians were being murdered, you know, and there was an assassination attempt on Edward the First, there was one on, you know, Philip de Montfort, those kind of things they were paid for. You know, it's. I think it was tough being an assassin. You have a great culture, but you've got no visible means of support and, you know, living up in a mountain. Not a lot of economic possibilities and you've got all those expensive castles to build. They often, I think, did their hits for quite large sums of money for non ideological reasons. It was just very pragmatic. The community survives. If we can build castles, we get money to build castles by hiring ourselves out as, you know, hard hands. And their customers, their employers were very largely Sunni Muslims, ironically, again, who you'd think would hate them and probably they did, but they were quite happy to give them money when they were useful. To kill either a crusader or another Sunni rival is very shifting sands. We look back at the Crusades as being a sort of black and white Christian versus Muslim. The more you look at it on the ground, religion is a factor, but it's just one of many. The venal things of being a human, all the wonderful things about humanity come to the fore.

Emily Briffett (34:12)

Seems far more nuanced than you might first expect. Now, I suppose at first glance, the Templars and Assassins seem vastly different. But you posed earlier that there's a lot of similarity between the two. My question is, how can we compare the two?

Dr. Steve Tibble (34:33)

Well, you're absolutely right. I mean, yeah, even when I first came across, I was kind of thinking, what on earth is going on here? It's something that's so crazy that I Think it's not really been commented on that much before because it's in your face, but it's so weird that you can't really believe what you're saying. And actually I think a lot of it comes back to, you know, Darwinism and anthropology. It's like, how do small groups of people respond under similar circumstances respond? And I think actually what we're seeing is that there are only a very limited number of ways that you can respond. And the small group that is the Templars and the small group that is the Assassins chose very, not identical, of course, but quite parallel responses. So if I just run through some of the similarities, and I wouldn't want to overemphasize this because they're clearly very, very different groups. They're both outnumbered, they're both surrounded by people who hate them in many instances. They both have no technological advantages, they both have potentially quite difficult economic circumstances. So you have to say, well, how do they respond to this? Because if you look at, say, all the minor states in the Middle east, they gradually get rolled up when the Crusaders arrive. There's, I don't know, dozen, 20 different principalities and by the middle of the 12th century, you're just down to a handful. The way they do it is a major area of commonality. And I don't think there was any copying. So all the big players became big players because they had big armies and they devoted the whole resources of their states to building up huge armies. So if you look at Saladin's budget, we have got an example of his budget from Egypt. It's something like 95% of the annual budget goes on the army. Okay. And the 5% that doesn't go to the army, which you think might go towards, you know, pensions or healthcare or whatever, it doesn't. Most of that goes to the Navy, fortifications, rebuilding walls, you know, that kind of thing. So these are states that are geared for total war. But if you're a small player and you try to compete, all you can do is fail. You can't recruit enough men, you can't equip them. As soon as they come out to fight, they get destroyed. So in the case of both the Templars and the Assassins, what they do is choose to do something better rather than something bigger. They go for something that is fit for purpose rather than fat for purpose. In the case of the Templars, they have a small group again of just a few hundred highly trained, ideologically super motivated people who are prepared to sacrifice themselves for their community. So in a Templar charge. For instance, say 1177, again, this is another hit on Saladin. So the Battle of Mon Gisar. There's a tiny, outnumbered Crusader army surrounded by Saladin, who had upwards of 20,000 men. The Crusaders took a huge gamble, came out to fight at a place called Monjizar. While Saladin's guys were overconfident and possibly too spread out. But what they did, facing an army of 20,000 men, was they had a Templar squadron led by the Master of the Templars in the front rank. And they point it at Saladin standards. This is not something about warfare in the generality. This is personal. You know, they've identified where Saladin. The man is sitting on Saladin's horse. This Templar squadron, which I think is 84 people, it's somewhere in the mid-80s anyway. It's not huge. 87 guys charge ferociously into the middle of an army of 20,000 guys. Because if you are elite and focused like a Templar or an assassin, and you're. You're charging on this very specific target, it can be very difficult to stop you. And the Templars at Mon Gisa killed a lot of his bodyguards. One of the guys got within a meter or so of him. Saladin ended up running from the battlefield on a racing camel. Most of his army was destroyed over the following 10 days as they were kind of hunted down. The whole army just disintegrated. And it. Which seems incredibly weird that a relatively small group can have that impact. But if it's. And I think this is the key to understanding the Assassins and the Templars is that they both intuitively understood that their brand and their promise of death meant that they had to have a delivery mechanism that was supremely focused. And the Templars did that on that day, nearly killed Saladin. But again, lucky guy. He was shaken but survived. And that went for the Assassins too. These were people who fought in the only way they could.

Emily Briffett (39:14)

I will say, Steve, talking about a brand, an identity, it makes it all sound incredibly cult like. I'm not sure that that's a fair comparison, though.

Dr. Steve Tibble (39:27)

I think you're absolutely right. I think there are aspects of that. And cult, it's become fairly pejorative. I would sit more in a classical sense where a cult is a devotee of a particular set of ideas. And I think on that basis they both have attributes of a cult anyway. So, you know, the Templars are highly trained, highly motivated, very devout people. And that you do find that they were not actually like many other religious orders. If you look at Christianity, obviously it's in theory a pacifistic religion based on peace and love. And if you look at most religious festivals of Christianity, it's to do with redemption, rebirth, life giving stuff. With the Templars, I mean, although they are very devout Christians, of course you find that they take a much bigger interest, you know, in their religious calendar is much more around the crucifixion, it's around Good Friday, it's around shedding your blood for your community. You know, Christ dies to save humanity. For the Christian community. They take a subtly different slant to everybody else. And I think there are aspects of the Assassins as well in that way, you know, that both sides cultivated martyrs and it was partly because that was kind of crazy, guys they were. But it is actually good for business if you have a tiny group of Templars who are so devoted and really embracing the idea of martyrdom. That's a really powerful force on the battlefield. And similarly with your fideus, they can't be drugged up, they can't be desensitized by narcotics. They need to be on their game. But if they're eager to be martyrs, if they really buy into it, if they are devotees of this cult, then they are a much more powerful and credible use of force. And once you've got credibility, then you've got leverage, then you're a small player, but you can sit at the table with the big boys. You know, it's all of that, it really works, I think in terms of medieval religion meeting power, politics and yeah, modern diplomacy.

Emily Briffett (41:31)

Well, both of these groups live on in legend. Arguably the Templar reputation has been somewhat tainted in comparison to that of the Assassins. Could you tell us about that case? Tell us about their afterlife?

Dr. Steve Tibble (41:46)

Yeah, they both have really interesting afterlives. I mean, clearly the fact that we're talking about them now, I mean, these are tiny groups, tiny groups, people. I mean, God, why are we talking about them, you know, but they do, they remain larger than life. And I think it's partly because of the manner of their ending. They each have a rather sad ending. In the Middle Ages before they had this kind of dramatic rebirth. So with the Templars, basically the Crusades are lost. The Templars in particular get a lot of the blame because they are a military order and they only had one job to do and that was protect the Holy Land. And clearly that didn't work. So they're suddenly redundant. And you get this whole thing where the French monarchy effectively suppresses the order by accusing them of these really weird, arcane, obviously trumped up Charges. So it means that they go straight from being the kind of poster boys, Christian fanaticism, almost into satanic devil worshipers and crazed heretics and magicians and all sorts of crazy stuff. So you go from one extreme to the other and then you get the same with the assassins. They have a rather sad ending. In Persia, basically, the Mongols come in and the Mongols are ferocious. If you think the promise of death, the branding is based on fear, but the Mongols don't have that. They are so implacable, there's just a wall of fear. You some of the Muslim chronicles about the Mongol invasions and the guys are pretty much saying, I've been too scared to even write this down, but now I'm forced to, you know, that kind of thing. Tis like they're writing about the end of the world. And so the Mongols were very much the nemesis of the assassins. In Persia. The assassins were used to, they're a bit cocky, used to, you know, punching above their weight. The Mongols came down, irritated them a bit and they responded by killing one of their generals. Big mistake. It's like that, you know, that went down like cul de in Mongol headquarters. And, you know, so in 1250s, they just basically destroyed 1256. Most of the, you know, Alamut and all the other castles were destroyed. There was a particularly sad ending because the final old man, the final assassin leader in Persia was so weak and so vacillating, he kind of really let side down, he became collaborator. So he tried to ingratiate himself with the Mongols. He went around telling his garrisons to surrender. They often told him where he could go. And eventually, when, when the last castle had either surrendered or refused to surrender, the Mongols said, oh, okay, we're going to take you for a feast and this will be your reward. And they beat him up, put him in a blanket and then kicked him to death. I mean, the word genocide is banded around a lot, but there was genuine attempts at genocide didn't quite succeed. But the Mongols did try to kill every of the Nizari Ishmaelis they could find in Persia and managed to gather them, concentrate them through different false methods, telling them they had to go for a muster and then wiping them out. So that was pretty grim. And then in Syria, where Sinan, you know, Sinan's castles had been, you find the Mamluks. Mamluks destroy the Mongols in 1260. So you can imagine anybody who's brutal enough to destroy the Mongols is just as brutal, if not more. And again, they were just impervious There was one particular sultan called Baibars who was massively ruthless, you know, dreadful guy and a tough, dreadful negotiator. He just completely emasculated the whole of the assassin network and, you know, chose when to fire the leaders. The Old man of the Mountain became a Mamluk post to be given out. And it's at that point that you find a lot of these hired hits are taking place. So the assassins by their survival through the blood of others and you find they kind of edge out of real history in a rather lame sort of way. There's in fact some later medieval legendary stories about Baibars. It's a kind of Robin Hood story where his sidekick is an assassin, a burglar, and goes and does all this petty crime for Baibars. And obviously it's fiction, but it does have a kernel of truth as in these proud brave groups of Fidaeus were reduced to being just kind of, you know, second rate sidekicks. So it's a bit of a sad ending there. But then all of them, assassins and Templars alike, continue to reverberate through the ages just because, wow, they were so extraordinary that we can't get rid of them. And then you take the fact that they were both so secretive and particularly in the case of the Templars, their archives were all lost. So you can pretty much say anything you like about the Templars because a lot of the records that you'd want to look at just were destroyed with the Assassins. They were always quite secretive anyway and a lot of their libraries were destroyed by the Mongols and you know, in other instances. So both of them are slightly, you know, enough about them to see that they're extraordinary and crazy and wow, you know, full of action. But equally there's enough gaps that you can write whatever you want onto it. You know, it's a whole rich world of stories that can be built up there, which is where the fun is, I think.

Emily Briffett (46:53)

So we go from history into legend, really. I think so many of us come to the story of assassins and Templars through myth, legend, conspiracy, video games. But there is far more to the story than that would suggest. We've spoke about so much, but it's all just a fraction of what we could cover. So Steve, if we could sum it up briefly, what would you like to leave listeners with? What's the final point we should talk about?

Dr. Steve Tibble (47:24)

I think there is a bigger picture here and it is a twofold story really. One is the story of how people can rise to the occasion in ways that are not always wonderful, but it's the survival of the human spirit. These are two groups of individuals, endangered people defending their communities. That leads on to the second point, which is don't necessarily put labels on things you call assassins, terrorists. And you've kind of shut down any kind of conversation you can have. You've shut down all the depth that you need to have to understand what they were really about, you know, and you can call the Templars Satan worshipers or whatever, and it's okay. Well, you've just shut down 99 of the reality labels of the death of history. And yeah, I think in particular, in these two extreme instances, you can see that in an extreme way.

History Extra Podcast Host (48:13)

That was Dr. Steve Tibble speaking to Emily Briffet. Steve is the author of Assassins and A Battle in Myth and Blood. He also appeared as an expert on our First Crusade podcast series and as mentioned in the conversation on an episode of History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories. Looking at the conspiracy theories that surround the Knights Templar, you can find those wherever you listen.

Liberties Journal Narrator (48:43)

Liberties is a journal that understands the past never stays past. Each quarterly issue features thoughtfully written essays that connect history, politics, and the big idea shaping our future. Whether it's liberalism in crisis, the roots of populism, or how memory shapes identity, Liberties offers timeless insight from today's most fearless writers. Come for the past, stay for the future of thought. Libertiesjournal.com.