‘We are oppressed and not oppressors’

Letter from the Old Man of the Mountain to Saladin

Amongst the minor groups that most contemporaries in the medieval Middle East would initially have nominated as ‘least likely to succeed’ were a small, unpopular band of Shi’ite religious enthusiasts. For most of their early history in the Holy Land they lacked a clear territorial or political base. They were small in number and without obvious economic assets. And they were widely despised by their powerful Sunni Muslim neighbours as heretics and traitors.

These were the famous ‘Assassins’.

During the crusades the winning formula was to put enormous amounts of money and energy into acquiring big armies. All the major players did it. The huge quantities of young, reckless men that this required were the underlying drivers for two centuries of war and criminality. They were also the basic building blocks upon which (almost) all power structures were built.

But if the major players struggled to build these voraciously expensive and disruptive armies, how did the minor players, the ones without the big budgets or pulling power, survive?

The short answer is that in most cases they did not. The majority of the smaller Turkic players and their city states gradually got rolled up into the bigger political entities that were forming around them – super-states such as Saladin’s Ayyubid empire or its Mamluk successors. The old ruling families survived as long as they could, but only as vassals. Before long almost all of them were swept away.

Almost, but not all.

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The Assassins and the Templars often had an extremely fractious relationship. They had ostensibly nothing in common. They had vastly different reputations and cultural backgrounds.

And yet in some ways they were strikingly similar.

Both groups, though they would not have deigned to recognise it, had a bizarrely similar cultural underpinning – overlapping objectives, similar strategies and strangely parallel defining characteristics.

Each was outnumbered. Each was surrounded. And each possessed no significant technological advantage over their enemies. They had to resort to fanaticism, focus and reckless bravery to redress the balance.

Both groups had some of the characteristics which we normally associate with being a ‘cult’. As we shall see, both of these ‘cults’ were formed around the promise of death. And both embodied the liberation, commitment and finality that accompanied such an acceptance. They looked for the death of their opponents and, although not wilfully suicidal, embraced the strong possibility of death themselves. Death was their promise and that promise lay at the heart of their power.

Each group also found a vital role as ‘state-builders’. This was an essential life raft for religious minorities in an often intolerant age – the Christian communities of the Middle East and the Nizari Ismaili Shi’ite minority, both nestling in the shadow of a potentially overwhelming Sunni empire, were always vulnerable. Both sects, Templars and Assassins alike, had, in effect, ambitions to create a state within a state.

Vitally for their image and the methodology of fear that they eventually became famous for, both were unusually structured – unlike most political entities in that time and place, they were corporations rather than the more typical ‘family-run businesses’. They knew that the death of a carefully chosen individual (a successful leader, say, a wife or a beloved child) would have a profound effect on the dynastically-centred states of their enemies, while they themselves were impervious to such threats.

These ostensibly opposite but strangely parallel groups kept bouncing off each other over a period of two centuries – and, up to the present day, they have become endlessly conjoined in our memories. Their reputations have each taken a similar arc, morphing from hard-nosed reality into absurd legends, and from champions of their communities into pantomime villains.

The methodologies they invented were different but parallel. The Assassins’ threat was death when you least expected it – poisoned daggers in the mosque, hidden murderers emerging from the shadows. The Templars’ threat was death exactly when you did expect it – when you saw them charging straight at you there was no bluster, no war cries, just the power of death on horseback speeding onwards like an implacable force of nature.

The tactics might be different, but the message, and the fear it provoked, was the same. Whether facing the Assassin hit squads (their elite fidais warriors) or a squadron of Templar knights, you knew you had a problem – these were people you needed to take far more seriously than their numbers would otherwise warrant.

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This book tells the story of the medieval world’s most extraordinary organisations, the Assassins and the Templars

One was a Shi’ite religious sect, the other a Christian military order created to defend the Holy Land. Violently opposed, they had vastly different reputations, followings, and ambitions. Yet they developed strikingly similar strategies―and their intertwined stories have, oddly enough, uncanny parallels.

The book traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. We discover how, outnumbered and surrounded, they survived only by perfecting “the promise of death,” either in the form of a Templar charge or an Assassin’s dagger. Death, for themselves or their enemies, was at the core of these extraordinary organisations.

Their fanaticism changed the medieval world – and, even up to the present day, in video games and countless conspiracy theories, they have become endlessly conjoined in myth and memory.