Who The RealLife Assassins Behind Assassins Creed Were

Who The Real-Life Assassins Behind Assassin’s Creed Were

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However mythical the idea might seem, the Assassins were very much a real group – but their motivations and tactics were different from the games.

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Who The RealLife Assassins Behind Assassins Creed Were

When Ubisoft announced the first Assassin’s Creed in 2006, the publisher made a point of highlighting the game’s basis in history, such as the Crusades, important figures, and ancient cities like Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus. Another point it touched on was the existence of a real Order of Assassins – but a lot of the group’s real history was left off the table, even though it’s just as interesting, if not moreso, than the fiction.

In the game, the Assassins are a secret society engaged in a war with the Knights Templar over artifacts called the Pieces of Eden, the real prize being whether humanity is free or under rigid control. The first Assassin’s Creed protagonist, Altaïr, is tasked with killing nine people. Some of these are completely fictional, while others were real figures like Robert de Sablé, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar between 1191 and 1192. The game is set during the Third Crusade, when the powers of Christian Europe tried to violently “reclaim” the Holy Land from Muslims. Altaïr’s tools include everything from hidden wrist blades to a “leap of faith” off of tall buildings.

In truth, as historians like Kenneth Setton and Marshall Baldwin explain, the Assassins were a Nizari Isma’ili sect of Shia Islam, founded by Hassan-i Sabbah in 1090 – six years before the First Crusade. Only a select cadre, the fida’is, actually carried out killings and espionage – there was a Nizari Isma’ili state with Assassin rulers such as Rashid ad-Din Sinan, who Assassin’s Creed’s Al Mualim is loosely based on. The fida’is were needed because the state lacked an army – killing or threatening other leaders deterred the sect’s enemies. In fact, according to Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, the Assassins are claimed to have killed hundreds of people before collapsing in 1275, including emirs, viziers, and caliphs, as well as a few Western rulers, like the King of Jersualem Conrad of Montferrat. None of the people Altaïr targets were murdered by the real-life Assassins.

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Facts vs. Myths: Or, Assassins Didn’t Practice Parkour

Who The RealLife Assassins Behind Assassins Creed Were

The real Assassins didn’t have wrist blades, but it was (probably falsely) rumored that some of them were so loyal that they would voluntarily leap to their death if ordered, hence Assassin’s Creed’s leap of faith. Their killings were often deliberately public, since the goal was terrorism. In other cases, merely the suggestion of violence was needed. In The Templars and the Assassins, James Wasserman notes that in 1118, the Seljuk sultan Ahmad Sanjar is said to have woken up one morning with a Assassin dagger stuck in the ground next to his bed. This not only won the Isma’ilis peace, but special favors from Sanjar.

Another parallel with the Assassin’s Creed game franchise is that the fida’is are alleged to have followed a code of conduct, and been well-trained in things like disguise. Two Assassins disguised as monks reportedly won the trust of Conrad of Montferrat before stabbing him to death. The famous Muslim ruler Saladin, in besieging the Assassin stronghold of Masyaf, is said to have found a warning next to his bed – pinned by a poisoned dagger – threatening to kill him if he didn’t withdraw. This is despite Saladin supposedly setting extra security around his tent in light of the Assassin threat, as mentioned in a 1906 book by Stanley Lane-Poole, called Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

It’s sometimes difficult to tell fact from fiction with the group, since a number of myths were spread by their enemies and foreigners like Marco Polo. The very word “assassin” is sometimes claimed to based on the Arabic word “hashashin,” referring to hashish users – the notion being that the the fida’is were plied with drugs. That’s an invention, as is Marco Polo’s claim that Assassin recruits were bribed with an earthly paradise, surrounded by milk, honey, opium, wine, and seductive women. That’s especially unlikely given that the real origin of their name is “Asāsiyyūn,” which translates into “people who are faithful to the foundation [of the faith].” To its credit, as far out as Assassin’s Creed can be, it ignores the most derogatory takes on the Assassins.

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As for the Templars in Assassin’s Creed, one theory proposed by Kevin James Lewis in The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century is that Raymond II, a count of Tripoli, was killed by the Assassins for letting the Templars establish themselves at Tortosa. The two factions came to blows multiple times, including a Templar siege mentioned by Baldwin, but of course there was no such thing as the Pieces of Eden. The groups were also motivated more by religion and power than any philosophy. The literal Assassin’s Creed – “nothing is true, everything is permitted” – is supposedly based on Sabbah’s last words, yet there’s no evidence for this.

Back in the modern day, there are rumors that the Assassin’s Creed series will return to the Third Crusade. These are dubious in their own right, but there’s plenty of fertile history to make use of if Ubisoft goes in that direction. There wasn’t much need to fictionalize the Assassins in the first place.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/assassins-creed-real-life-story-assassins-templar-history/

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