The Knights Templar vs the Order of Assassins

During the crusades, there was a legendary rivalry between two extraordinary medieval orders: the Assassins and the Templars. Separating myth from history, we uncover their beliefs, covert operations and lasting legacy, revealing how truth and legend became forever entwined. For this series, we're joined by Steve Tibble, author of many books on the Crusades, including 'Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood'. Produced by James Hickmann and McKenna Fernandez, and edited by Jhenelle White. Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player. 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 in white mantles marked with those red crosses sworn to defend

• 0:44Dan Snow?

  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 immortalised in legend and myth. We've got the Nazari Ishmaelis, the Assassins, to you and me, and we've got the Templars. Who were they really?

• 1:29Dan Snow?

  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 holy wars that swept across the Holy Land for 200 years, pitting Christians 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.

• 2:13Dan Snow?

  Steve, good to see you.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Ah, very good to see you, Dan.

• 2:16Dan Snow?

  You've got these two sort of semi-mythical, these legendary orders. Did they, they were contemporary with each other? Did they, did they know each other?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the weird thing about it. On, 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 versus predator of the medieval world. But the reality is, they knew each other, they bounced off each other, they hated each other, they had many different kinds of relationships, and they were in the same place at the same time. It's incredibly weird.

• 2:51Dan Snow?

  Weirdly, I'm guessing, almost quite good for their brand to have a bit of yin and yang going on.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's definitely that. Um, there's also a kind of interplay between effectively their methodology, 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 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.

• 3:33Dan Snow?

  Branding, love it. Let, let's get into the, the backstory. Let's start with the assassins. Where are we? Geography? What, what, what is their nature?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, just to be pedantic, start off with, I'm a historian, so you know, it's good to be pedantic. We're, we're talking assassins with an uppercase A here. And that's a very important distinction because this is a particular group of individuals. It's a sect, in effect, it's a religious sect. Whereas if you look in the dictionary now, you get lots of references to the mafia and, and contract killers. And, um, I mean, clearly there's an overlap. There's, there's a reason why contract killers are called assassins nowadays. And it's because there is a linkage with, with this religious sect. But back in the 12th century, which is mostly what we're talking about, they were, they were very much an oppressed minority, a, a small religious subset.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  They were, the, the proper name for them was um Nisari Ishmaelis. Uh, and so they're an offshoot from Ishmaelism. Ishmaelism is an offshoot from Shiism and Shiism is an offshoot from Islam. Um, that's a very simplified version of things, but it does mean that there is a, 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.

• 4:56Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:06Dan Snow?

  And is there, is there a geographical center as well?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yes, indeed. So they start off um in Egypt where the Fatimid Ishmaelis are. Um, and they, they, they form in ten ninety-four, there's a split, the, their leader Nizar i- 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, 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.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  So you get this kind of double whammy. So these, these Nisari Ishmaelis are um heretics in, in, in, in Persia, Iran. And they effectively start something that's like the Vietnam War, a kind of a nationalist ideological war against their, their Sunni overlords. And in doing so, they, they discover two things really, that 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.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  So what do they do? They, they choose the real Darwinistic approach, which is to be fit for purpose. So they're fittest rather than fattest. And they, they know, they understand that they can really leverage power by killing one person.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  So if you have a tiny group of highly committed people, they can get places that an army of ten thousand 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.

• 7:04Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Um, 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, the characters that appear in Assassin's Creed and, you know, current cultural history are very much from the Syrian assassin Ishmael background.

• 7:30Dan Snow?

  And so they, but they, but they're territorially based, they conquer, they sort of ha- have, have what castles, they have lands, they collect rent, do they? I mean, how does that work?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's interesting. So, so in, in, in, in Persia, they have, they carve out their own little niche in, 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 in 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.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  The trouble is as soon as he dies, suddenly they're, they're heretics who are resented and there's an absolute massacre. So this happens twice, Aleppo and then Damascus. And then after that, they kind of realize, uh, 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, 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 seventy assassin castles. I, I don't believe that figure. I mean, certainly not big castles, but they were, they had a whole network of castles

• 9:03Speaker 01

  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 princedom, 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 even by being even more dangerous than the guys around you.

• 9:37Dan Snow?

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• 10:17Dan Snow?

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• 10:52Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what'll baffle historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

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• 12:07Speaker 03

  In a world where swords were sharp.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Me, Matt Lewis.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  And me, Dr Eleanor Yanaga. Dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 12:40Dan 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?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  They're not in some senses. They're international.

• 12:56Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  But in a way, the Ishmaelites are international as well. They're, they're an idea that their 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 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 Ishmaelites, 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

• 13:42Speaker 01

  and Bethlehem and Nazareth and so on. The 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 were an

• 14:24Speaker 01

  attempt to create this kind of international force. I was gonna say peacekeeping force, but it's not like that at all.

• 14:31Dan Snow?

  Almost mercenary, you might say, so sort of funded funded from lots, not a national army, not a.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:46Dan Snow?

  Everyone's getting paid.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  They all need to get paid, but but they are equally all volunteers and they're there because they love their religion and their community and they're trying to do the right thing. So bizarrely, you find the just at the same time as the Ishmaelis, Nazari Ishmaelis, in other words, the assassins, are building up a castle network on the borders of the Crusader states in between what 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

• 15:30Speaker 01

  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 Templars, like the Assassins, are very few in number. They're surrounded, you know, they're surrounded by bigger, much bigger Muslim politists. And they need to punch above their weight. And the thing about the Templars, like the Assassins, is that they realised that if you've got only a small number of guys, you have to make everything count. So they pretty much adopted a similar methodology.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  So where with the Assassins, you knew that 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 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.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:19Dan Snow?

  Amazing. And the Templars, they could come from all over, what we might call Christendom, so all over much of Europe.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 17:25Dan Snow?

  And then they'd arrive in the Holy Land, and there would, but people would also, there'd be fundraisers. People would be passing the hat around from Ireland to parts of Iberia, through right across, raising money for the Templars.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, relatively small numbers of guys. And in the Eastern Mediterranean, you might say they're warmongers. You know, the Eastern Mediterranean, these are the guys who are muscular. They're 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 schmoozers, you know, they're they're guys who are peacemongers, because what the last thing they want is for European powers to be fighting. What they want is for European kings

• 18:19Speaker 01

  to have enough money and time and peace to be able to go on crusade themselves. And and they also just shuffle money from the the West into the East, hence the investment banking.

• 18:30Dan Snow?

  Yeah, people say they invent international banking and because so so someone in Ireland gives a gives a few coins to the Templars, someone in Jerusalem is able to withdraw that from a.

• 18:44Speaker 01

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

• 19:04Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Because it was just, you know, there's money going through the bank, but they were often on the verge of bankruptcy. Because the money was being spent on castles.

• 19:11Dan Snow?

  Expensive business, expensive business trying to maintain soldiers and castles.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Those castles are like aircraft carriers.

• 19:17Dan Snow?

  Yeah, extraordinary. Okay, so we've got these two groups. Uh, did did they, did they, did they, you you mentioned that they were extorting money. I mean, did they, did they, did they explicitly, did they regard each other as a primary enemy or or in the ever shifting mosaic of the Holy Land, did they sometimes find themselves on different sides?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's a very good point. The I I think it's, I forget who it was, who said it, Palmerston, maybe. Uh, 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 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 and against the the Crusaders, whereas in reality, they often fought on the same side as the Crusaders. Um, they actually allied themselves with the the Crusaders in many cases. Um, and in fact, there's one wonderful instance where.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  They negotiated so closely with with the Christians and with King Amorik of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem that that they were coming into a very close alliance. The Christians even believed that they might be coming open to conversion, which I actually doubt, but they were certainly cozying up. And ironically, they were philosophically much more open minded than than many of the other people. They were much more open minded than, say, Catholic Christians or Sunni Muslims at the time. They they used to read philosophy. They had, you know, Plato by their bed sides and so on. I mean, it's very, um, it's not impossible that they would have closed it up. And they were becoming so close that the Templars, who were their neighbors and extortionists and landlords, you know,

• 21:04Speaker 01

  really hated it. And there was, um, 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 Assassin's Territories,

• 21:24Speaker 01

  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 Moenil, 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 butchered 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

• 22:06Speaker 01

  went absolutely bonkers and and tried to to hang, um, Walter and and his and his colleagues. And it almost came to to civil war. Luckily for the Templars, um, poor Amorik or dear Amorik, um, died in the process. Um, the Papacy were just trying to knock a few heads together to stop it getting into civil war. Um, but Walter only survived because because Amorik died of dysentery, I think.

• 22:33Dan 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 the stories that were told about them and the and the whispers that have gone on through centuries?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  No, it, I, I think it's a lovely one. It's a lovely case study in branding, image, and how that bleeds into legend. I, 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, 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 realised

• 23:31Speaker 01

  that by taking out a main man, you could have a, 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.

• 23:46Dan Snow?

  There was a, there was a warlord and then his subordinates.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  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 favourite nephew, he's got wives, he's got children, you know, which is great on one level, it's all very cosy, 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 Iobid Empire. You kill his nephew, who's, you know, he's thinking about, you know, his real favourite, then, you know, something really changes and there's a chance of completely destroying them. Whereas if you kill the Old Man of the Mountain, there's another one by Tuesday. You know, it's basically a job title rather than an individual. If you kill the master of the Templars, they don't care. I mean, you just get a more angry

• 24:32Speaker 01

  bunch of Templars with a new master by Wednesday morning. So they, they have this methodology that, that exploits other people's weaknesses, but they're not prone to that weakness themselves. And the assassins, the reason why 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, no, 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.

• 25:02Dan Snow?

  There's been plenty of it.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You know, Romans did a lot of it, Greeks did a lot of it. I mean, you know.

• 25:06Dan Snow?

  Nero sent assassins to kill his mum.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  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 but they they made an art form. So if they, for instance, when they're cozying up

• 25:52Speaker 01

  to the rulers of Damascus or Aleppo, when those leaders, one of the levers they have in insinuating themselves into 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 and literally you find that some of the most senior people in the Islamic world are being killed by by the by the assassins. And it it's famous. It makes them hated in the Sunni community, which because they think they're heretics, but now they're bloody murdering heretics. And they've got this aura of fear around them.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  So to the soon is they start creating um 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, 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 downmarket, 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.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:43Dan Snow?

  And what I mean, were they particularly good at assassinating people? I mean, did they sort of, did they train? Was it part of their doctrine?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, sad, we haven't got the, you know, the H R 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.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  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 head.

• 28:49Dan Snow?

  Sneaking about.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Thinking about, you know.

• 28:51Dan Snow?

  Transformation impossible.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, where's where's my next Mars bar or something? Because you're 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.

• 29:08Dan Snow?

  What are some of the greatest hits?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Greatest hit? Well, literally, they're, 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 the leading warlord of of the Turks, who was being was an older guy being carried to his harim on a 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

• 29:47Speaker 01

  easy, but politically, it just changed everything. And similarly, with even, say, Edward Edward the first, you know, you can get someone like Edward the first. When Edward was in in town in twelve seventy two, 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.

• 30:21Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  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 butch, 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.

• 30:47Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Killing him instantly. So you might say, well, that's pretty pathetic. You know, the assassin had him cold, had him unprepared, had him unarmored. He should have killed him. And that's true.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  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 and when he recovered from the knife wound and the poison, he wrote his will, you know, he was a guy who was fixated with mortality because the assassins had got to him once. And, you know, 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.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  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, his stick, 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 neighbours. But his PR campaign to justify that was to say, well, if you give me all the power,

• 32:25Speaker 01

  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 Ishmaelis and the Assassins suddenly have a commonality of purpose. They both got a nemesis, I mean, to the nemesis in the real sense of the word. And they both set out to create a series of hits on Saladin.

• 32:50Dan Snow?

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• 33:31Dan Snow?

  And the assassins get pretty close. Well, the legend, there's one about sort of a knife in the tent or something, isn't there?

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, it's fabulous. And it's true. I mean, we don't know how many. And interestingly, the assassins were involved in a conspiracy to kill Saladin in the winter of 1173, 1174. And they were doing that in conjunction with the Crusaders and the Fatimids. So they were getting together. So there's no sense in which they hate the Christians particularly. They're not, you know, like Palmsden, they just have interests rather than friends.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  And in some ways, the Christians are more easy allies for them because they don't care about Muslim theology. To them, the assassins are the assassins, they're not heretics. So they tried to kill him in 1173, 1174, but the plot gets blown, the conspirators are crucified, and this is in Cairo. 1175, Saladin is in a siege, doing what he's normally doing, which is attacking his Sunni neighbours. He's in a siege of Lepo. And the assassins really go gangbusters to try and get rid of him, you know, because they know that

• 34:51Speaker 01

  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 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...

• 35:38Speaker 01

  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 thirteen of them rush the tent. And it's blood everywhere, blades everywhere.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Um, they kill a lot of bodyguards, they kill emirs, um, they almost get to Saladin, you know, we're talking centimeters. And then every assassin is butchered. They so they come down, they they're wiped out. And that's um, almost the closest they get to him.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  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 uh, another Sunni neighbor and um, Azaz.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  And the assassins try again. And you'd you'd think they would have given up at this point, but being assassins, they never give up. That is part of the brand. You know that they're gonna be around there, you know? They'll they'll take out your grandchildren, you know, if 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. Um, I don't know if you've done, you've you've probably seen lots of pictures of Saladin. He he 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 but what the pictures don't show you is what's underneath.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  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're 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. Um, he, we know, we know what he was thinking because we've still got some of his correspondence. Um, but, you know, and he was writing to his nephew, saying, for God's sake, you know, really watch out.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  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 Masyaf, which is, you know, the big castle that the assassins have got. Where the old man is holed up. And they have this kind of, we've still got some of the correspondence. They have this kind of hate hate relationship where they're threatening each other. But the weird thing is, it's so asymmetric that they really struggle to find a conclusion. So Saladin knows he's got huge armies and his armies destroy the assassins' villages.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  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 villagers being burned and their people killed and their castles attacked.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  So you, they reached a kind of strange impasse. During the negotiations, the, the, the assassins tried another crazy hit, it seems. Where one of them was hiding in a walnut tree.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:05Dan Snow?

  Well, he was close.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  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 him forever. But they never fall out again. There's clearly some correspondence missing, which is secret correspondence saying, okay.

• 40:28Dan Snow?

  I'll back off.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Back 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 managed to survive and intimidate.

• 41:09Dan 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 faced with a battle, you think, oh, at the very least. We're going to fight on our hands here.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:19Dan Snow?

  And given that that can be half the battle sometimes, it's persuading the other side not to fight you.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. And if you look at if you look at the the year after, so eleven seventy seven, the year after that that. The 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 Montgisart. Where Saladin had invaded the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem with a huge army. And the the Crusaders were very intimidated. You know, 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.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  He just kind of allowed, 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, um, the army, I think, was commanded by Reynold de Chatiore, 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 eighty-four men, just eighty-four. So they're facing an army of up to twenty thousand.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  But these eighty-four 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. Um, he ran, he, he had a racing camel, he managed to run, ran away on the battlefield. And his army was, was destroyed. They, they had real trouble, um, getting back to Egypt. They, they basically disintegrated because it was November, the weather was awful.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  And they, they just got, got terrified and, and destroyed over the next ten days. But it was pretty much the closest the crusaders ever got to him. And it was a Templar squadron that did it. It is that same, it's that same commitment to death. It's the promise of death that a Templar squadron brings with it.

• 43:46Dan Snow?

  What about decline? Because they both, and like everything, they declined.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. They, um, they're clearly, they're very small groups of people. And we're talking in the period of the Crusades, we're talking about almost two hundred years. To me, the weird thing is they both survived as long as they did. Um, but as you say, you know, they, they did get destroyed or overcome. So the, the assassins in, in, um, Persia.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Came across somebody even nastier and more difficult than themselves in the face of the Mongols. So, you know, in the twelve fifties, the Mongols appear in the region.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  And they are incredibly remorseless. When they first arrive, the assassins are quite pleased. And they cozy up to them and 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 we'll help you with that. So they they thought it was an opportunity, because I think they thought anybody who's killing that many Sunni Muslims can't be all bad.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  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. So, sort of, you know, good, full marks for trying, but.

• 45:06Dan Snow?

  Don't kill a Mongol.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Don't call a Mongol.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  So, let's let's guess what happens next. So the Mongols then go absolutely dilatally 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, the like head office has just been taken out.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  But the Mongols kind of followed them down. In twelve sixty, the Mongols invaded what, you know, the Latin Kingdom, what was the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century. And they met the Mamluks. There was a huge battle in twelve sixty at a place called Einzelut.

• 46:05Dan Snow?

  One of the big ones.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there is this thing where, you know, the idea of the decisive battle is is much denigrated.

• 46:14Dan Snow?

  But that was one of them.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. If there ever was one, the Mongols were definitively turned back. Their, 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.

• 46:34Dan Snow?

  That's a good point.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  It has to be even even more dangerous. And that's exactly what happened. There was a a Mamluk Sultan called Baybars.

• 46:42Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  He was he was a superb commander, not not a nice guy, you know, not not a 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,

• 47:24Speaker 01

  as he was then, that was a hit commissioned by Baybars, because Edward was there with a tiny army, but Baybars 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 Baybars had a problem with with a an enemy, whether it was Muslim or or Christian, he would he would chuck a bit of money, a bit of 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 so they'd be it's a sad ending. They became creatures and creatures that survived only by other people's blood.

• 48:07Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  But they made they did survive.

• 48:11Dan 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.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:23Dan Snow?

  But no army to pay for.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. And, you know, it's the R.

• 48:27Dan Snow?

  A bit awkward.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Or unfair as they would say, but it's like they had kind of painted themselves into a corner, you know, the Templars had one job and that was to defend the Holy Land and they, you know, blatantly hadn't done that. And so by thirteen oh seven, you have a French monarchy who's cash strapped, um, 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, Philip's already put the screws on the local Lombard bankers twice. So they've been accused of crazy things and then had their money stolen. The Jewish community has been rounded up, um, had all their money extorted and then, and then expelled. Uh,

• 49:23Speaker 01

  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 say that in a non-moral sense. It was a good way of extorting money from people who were, were temporarily powerless. And the Templars being redundant and quite inflexible and a bit arrogant as well, um, fell neatly into that kind of sort of, you know, Venn diagram of, of people I can get money from. And he, he accused them of doing super crazy things like Satan worship, uh, being traitors to Christ and, um, uh, you know, a lot of, just threw everything

• 50:06Speaker 01

  at it. Uh, it was like the biggest tabloid story of the thirteenth century and just closed the order down. So it's 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, that's a corporate objective you couldn't, you couldn't fulfill. Um, and they had brought some of it on themselves while being so arrogant, but they deserved 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.

• 50:36Dan Snow?

  Wow. Fascinating stuff. Thank you so much, Steve, for coming on to talk about it. You've just written a book called Assassins and Templars. I, it is a great story. Thanks for coming on.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dan. Really loved it.

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• 52:17Dan Snow?

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