Thirteen men. Unlucky for someone. They were dressed to kill – and in this case that meant that they looked exactly like everyone else. Part of the background. They moved closer and closer. No pushing, no shouting, just heading towards their target. But their progress was checked. There was a shout from behind as they walked on with studied nonchalance. Someone recognised a familiar face. An acquaintance, not a friend. They had no friends.
A puzzled expression followed by a simple question. ‘What are you doing here?’ There was a moment of indecision. It felt like an eternity but was barely a second. Should they try to bluff their way through? Or cover blown, should they literally carve their way through to the target?
The chosen answer was simple and shocking – an explosion of flashing weapons and violence as the fidais team erupted into the tent where their victim sat, unawares and at the centre of a very different kind of attention, surrounded by generals, lackeys and bodyguards. Blood sprayed everywhere as daggers and swords did their work.
It was all over in a matter of seconds.
Saladin and a Sunni Empire
Ayyubid expansion between 1174 and 1193 – Wikimedia Commons
Relations between the Assassins and Nur al-Din (a devout Sunni Muslim of Turkic heritage) had inevitably been difficult. The chronicler Abu Firas wrote of a time the fidais managed to penetrate his security while he slept. They left a dagger by his head, on which was engraved an unambiguous and suitably menacing greeting: ‘If you do not leave tomorrow night, this dagger will be stuck in your belly’. Perhaps not surprisingly, when he died in 1174 Nur al-Din was said to be planning a major attack on the Nizari strongholds.
But Saladin was a far greater threat. His empire was so much bigger – under him, for the first time, the main Muslim powers in the region were forcibly dragged, often kicking and screaming, into a single regime.
Saladin, as a usurper desperate to shore up his shaky image as a legitimate ruler, found it useful to pose as the champion of Sunni orthodoxy. The idea of a ‘Holy War’ against the crusaders and the Nizari ‘heretics’ was an attractive tool to help further his ambitions. It gave him a PR shield, behind which he could destroy his Sunni rivals, while simultaneously claiming that he needed to do so in order to bring overwhelming force to bear against the outsiders. Saladin spent eighty per cent of his reign fighting his Sunni neighbours, but his propaganda machine glossed lightly over that embarrassing truth – both Assassins and Franks slipped easily and conveniently into the roles of scapegoats. They were the unifying bogeymen of his self-justification.
Usurper or not, Saladin’s ruthless success was a disaster for both the Templars and the Assassins. It represented a major deterioration of their military and political situation. They were now definitively surrounded and vastly outnumbered by an increasingly consolidated Sunni empire.
But, left with no other option, they continued to throw themselves into the fray. They both correctly identified that his new empire posed an existential threat. Both groups tried to kill him several times during the 1170s. Each used their own characteristic and dramatic methods of death-dealing.
Saladin became the urgent target of their attentions.
‘With some deadly blows’
Ayyubid or Zengid soldiers in Seljuk-type clothes and sharbush hats on the Palmer Cup (1200–1215) – Wikimedia Commons
Saladin was already high on the Assassins’ hit list, but he also moved against the Nizari ‘heretics’ in a manner which increased his unpopularity still further. While on his way to attack his fellow Sunni rivals in Aleppo at the end of 1174, he still found time to send his men off to raid Ismaili territory in the Jabal as-Summaq, destroying villages and killing their inhabitants. The Sunni historian, Ibn al-Jawzi, claimed that it was these attacks which sparked off the Assassins’ animosity.
Plans were immediately set in train by Sinan for a series of retaliatory attacks. The first fidais team struck in January 1175, while Saladin was besieging Aleppo. They got close – but not close enough.
Thirteen men, all armed with knives, were chosen to kill him. The size of the team was a direct reflection of the importance of the hit. Saladin was a priority target, and Sinan wanted him definitively eliminated on the first attempt, before his security measures could be ramped up. The team timed their attack to coincide with the communal meal, when servants and guests would be milling around and everyone would be most at ease – and most distracted. Everything was in place for an overwhelming assault.
It was thwarted by a single piece of bad luck. When the fidais arrived at Saladin’s camp, ‘an emir called Khumartakin, lord of the castle of Abu Qubays, saw and recognized them, because he was their neighbour who met and fought with them often. When he saw them, he said to them, “What has brought you here? On what business have you come?” ’
It was an easy question with no easy answer. Knives were drawn as they tried to push their way through. They stabbed the emir ‘with some deadly blows and one of their number charged towards Saladin to slay him but was killed before he could reach him. The rest of the Ismailis began to fight and killed several persons before they themselves were killed.’
The fidais team failed, but they took as many of the Ayyubid soldiers with them as possible. The Assassin who got closest to Saladin was ferociously cut down, and his head was hacked off by an emir who came to the sultan’s rescue. Saladin’s chancellor, Imad al-Din, wrote that ‘the others were not killed until they had killed a number of people’. The fidais did not die quietly.
Saladin’s propagandists had long sought to denigrate their enemies by association with heretics and crusaders. Trying to extract at least something good from what had clearly been a very close call, they claimed that the Assassins had been put up to it by the sultan’s rivals in Aleppo. This was not impossible, but it was also very convenient. The Assassins had plenty of strong motives to kill Saladin in their own right. They may have been coordinating their attacks with the sultan’s enemies for practical or tactical considerations, but it was not the main driver behind their animosity.
Saladin himself was shaken by the attack. He composed a letter, while he was still in the freezing siege camp of Aleppo, to his nephew, Farrukh-Shah – the weather was harsh, he wrote, ‘but men’s minds are hardened by the expectation of victory’. He made it clear that he believed the Aleppans to be behind the attempt, and that they were working in concert with the Assassins.
The sultan wrote that they had already received large sums of money for their attempted assassination. He advised his nephew to be on his guard at all times, and to surround himself only with men who he already knew. Above all, Saladin was now fully aware that the Nizaris were coming for him – in a vivid turn of phrase, he told Farrukh-Shah that ‘the knives have been distributed’.
Sinan sends his regards
A 15th-century depiction of Saladin – British Library MS Add. 30359
After the failure of the attack at Aleppo, there was a period of bluster, threat and bad-tempered diplomacy. It was perhaps after this first attempt on his life that Saladin was said to have ‘sent a messenger to [Sinan] with a threatening message, and [Sinan] said to the messenger: “I will show you the men with whom I will encounter him”. Then he made a sign to a group of the companions to throw themselves off the highest point of the fortress, and they threw themselves one after another and perished.’ Regardless of the details of the encounter (and this was, after all, a Sunni account of the episode) the theatre of death was a stock in trade of Nizari diplomacy. They were happy to re-emphasise it at critical points.
Kamal al-Din’s biography of Sinan includes excerpts from a letter which Sinan is said to have written to Saladin, also in response to a message from the sultan. The correspondence probably dates to this same period of hate-filled ‘phoney-war’. Saladin had, it seems, demanded Sinan’s presence at his court. The demand had been accompanied by insults and threats against the Assassins’ castles and lands.
Mysterious as ever, Sinan set the tone of his response by riposting with some suitably menacing poetry:
O you who threaten me with strokes of the sword, May my power never rise again if you overthrow it! The dove rises up to threaten the hawk, The hyenas of the desert are roused against the lions! He tries to stop the mouth of the viper with his finger, Let the pain his finger feels suffice him.
Having established the mandatory threatening nature of his reply, Sinan proceeded in a characteristically esoteric manner. It is worth quoting the letter in some detail, as it is one of the rare instances in which we get a first-hand insight into the mind of a Nizari leader. It shows how he saw the world and, just as importantly, given the Assassins’ dependence on the leverage of fear, how he wanted the world to see him.
‘We have read the gist and details of your letter,’ Sinan wrote, ‘and taken note of its threats against us with words and deeds, and by God it is astonishing to find a fly buzzing in an elephant’s ear and a gnat biting statues. Others before you have said these things and we destroyed them and none could help them…If indeed your orders have gone forth to cut off my head and tear my castles from the solid mountains, these are false hopes and vain fantasies.’
Sinan continued in similar vein, setting out self-justifications which verged upon self-pity, alongside supremely accomplished threats. ‘We are oppressed and not oppressors, deprived and not deprivers’, he wrote, slightly peevishly, ‘…prepare means for disaster and don a garment against catastrophe; for I will defeat you from within your own ranks and take vengeance against you at your own place, and you will be as one who encompasses his own destruction.’ The conclusion to Sinan’s reply was all the more menacing for its lack of hyperbole. ‘When you read this letter of ours,’ he wrote, ‘be on the lookout for us.’
The fidais were on their way again.
‘Hardly Crediting His Escape’
Dirham coin issued by Saladin in AD 1190-91. It shows the Sultan sitting facing, cross-legged, on high-backed throne. Image by Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com
In May 1176 Saladin was besieging the castle of ‘Azaz, which belonged to one of his Sunni rivals. Here the Assassins launched another, and even more deadly, attempt on his life, with a smaller but more focused team.
Having failed to inflict fatal blows on the sultan in the first attempt, this time the fidais had strict orders to go for the most vulnerable, and critical, parts of Saladin’s body – his neck and head. ‘On 22 May 1176,’ wrote Ibn al-Athir, ‘while Saladin was in a tent belonging to one of his emirs, [a man] called Jawuli, the commander of the Asadi troop, [an Assassin] leapt on him, struck him on the head with a dagger and wounded him.’
This was close, but not close enough. The dagger, which was launched at his skull, met with iron rather than with flesh. Spooked by the previous attempt, Saladin was more protected than before. Under his flowing outer garments, he was almost totally covered in layers of concealed body-armour.
The armour saved Saladin’s life. ‘Had it not been for the mailed helmet under his cap,’ wrote Ibn al-Athir, ‘he would have been killed. Saladin grasped the [Assassin’s] hand in his, although he was unable totally to prevent him striking a blow. However, he could only give him weak blows. The [Assassin] continued striking him on the neck with his dagger. Saladin was wearing a brigandine and the blows fell on the collar of the brigandine, cutting into it. The chainmail prevented the blows reaching his neck, because his allotted end was still some way off.’
Saladin’s men immediately rushed to his aid. An emir, named Yazkush (an old retainer of Saladin’s uncle, Shirkuh), ‘came forward and seized the dagger in his hand. The [Assassin] wounded him but he did not let go until the [Assassin] was killed. Another Ismaili advanced and was killed, and then a third, who was also killed.’ Saladin was hustled away to his tent ‘in a state of shock, hardly crediting his escape.’
The second team member had killed one of Saladin’s commanders, a man named Da’ud, before being hacked down in turn. Another fidais fought on until he was killed by Saladin’s brother. The last surviving Nizari escaped from the tent, but was torn apart by the crowd that had quickly gathered outside.
The fidais had got close by being disguised as members of Saladin’s own elite guard. After the attack, security had to be tightened still further, with particular attention being paid to the soldiers surrounding the sultan. Ibn Wasil wrote that:
‘The sultan rode to his tent, terrified by this event, with his blood flowing down his cheek and the collar of his chainmail wet. He hid himself away, took precautions and constructed around his tent something resembling a palisade to cover it. He sat in a wooden house, on his guard against the soldiery. Those whom he did not like [the look of] he sent away and those he recognised he allowed in.’
Security measures such as this ruined many careers. Proximity to power was everything, and being deprived of that proximity could be a disaster. In a rather touching HR aside, Imad al-Din, who had been an eye-witness to the attack, wrote that when Saladin ‘rode out, if he saw anyone in his entourage whom he did not know, he had them removed. [But] afterwards he would ask about them and if they wanted intercession or help, he would help them.’
It was not just the sultan who was shaken. Shock-waves reverberated throughout Saladin’s fragile, personality-based empire. Ibn Abi Tayy, a Shi’ite chronicler, wrote that ‘the army was disturbed and people were afraid of one another’. Saladin quickly sent a reassuring message back to Egypt, in order to discourage any thought of an uprising. ‘There was only a scratch with some few drops of blood,’ he wrote implausibly. Perhaps more to the point, he was keen to emphasise that ‘there is nothing to cause distress.’
But everyone knew that it had been a close run thing.
Peace Without Trust
Saladin, not surprisingly, responded with violence, putting Sinan’s castle of Masyaf under siege. Eventually a grudging truce was cobbled together.
After this, the Assassins generally remained neutral. They had presumably given reassurances to Saladin about his personal safety. He too, however much he privately detested them as heretics who had killed his friends and tried to murder him, seems to have pulled back from the brink of further antagonism. He did not involve them or their lands in his attacks on the Franks. And, extraordinarily, he even included them in peace treaties that he drew up which might affect their interests.
An uneasy peace was sustained. Love binds – but so too does fear.
Steve Tibble, an honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, has a new book out – Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood – from Yale University Press. It tells the true history behind the hugely popular video game Assassin’s Creed and the medieval world’s two most extraordinary organisations, tracing their origins, strategies, violent clashes, and enduring legacy in myth and memory.
You can get your copy of Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood through
By Steve Tibble
Thirteen men. Unlucky for someone. They were dressed to kill – and in this case that meant that they looked exactly like everyone else. Part of the background. They moved closer and closer. No pushing, no shouting, just heading towards their target. But their progress was checked. There was a shout from behind as they walked on with studied nonchalance. Someone recognised a familiar face. An acquaintance, not a friend. They had no friends.
A puzzled expression followed by a simple question. ‘What are you doing here?’ There was a moment of indecision. It felt like an eternity but was barely a second. Should they try to bluff their way through? Or cover blown, should they literally carve their way through to the target?
The chosen answer was simple and shocking – an explosion of flashing weapons and violence as the fidais team erupted into the tent where their victim sat, unawares and at the centre of a very different kind of attention, surrounded by generals, lackeys and bodyguards. Blood sprayed everywhere as daggers and swords did their work.
It was all over in a matter of seconds.
Saladin and a Sunni Empire
Relations between the Assassins and Nur al-Din (a devout Sunni Muslim of Turkic heritage) had inevitably been difficult. The chronicler Abu Firas wrote of a time the fidais managed to penetrate his security while he slept. They left a dagger by his head, on which was engraved an unambiguous and suitably menacing greeting: ‘If you do not leave tomorrow night, this dagger will be stuck in your belly’. Perhaps not surprisingly, when he died in 1174 Nur al-Din was said to be planning a major attack on the Nizari strongholds.
But Saladin was a far greater threat. His empire was so much bigger – under him, for the first time, the main Muslim powers in the region were forcibly dragged, often kicking and screaming, into a single regime.
Saladin, as a usurper desperate to shore up his shaky image as a legitimate ruler, found it useful to pose as the champion of Sunni orthodoxy. The idea of a ‘Holy War’ against the crusaders and the Nizari ‘heretics’ was an attractive tool to help further his ambitions. It gave him a PR shield, behind which he could destroy his Sunni rivals, while simultaneously claiming that he needed to do so in order to bring overwhelming force to bear against the outsiders. Saladin spent eighty per cent of his reign fighting his Sunni neighbours, but his propaganda machine glossed lightly over that embarrassing truth – both Assassins and Franks slipped easily and conveniently into the roles of scapegoats. They were the unifying bogeymen of his self-justification.
Usurper or not, Saladin’s ruthless success was a disaster for both the Templars and the Assassins. It represented a major deterioration of their military and political situation. They were now definitively surrounded and vastly outnumbered by an increasingly consolidated Sunni empire.
But, left with no other option, they continued to throw themselves into the fray. They both correctly identified that his new empire posed an existential threat. Both groups tried to kill him several times during the 1170s. Each used their own characteristic and dramatic methods of death-dealing.
Saladin became the urgent target of their attentions.
‘With some deadly blows’
Saladin was already high on the Assassins’ hit list, but he also moved against the Nizari ‘heretics’ in a manner which increased his unpopularity still further. While on his way to attack his fellow Sunni rivals in Aleppo at the end of 1174, he still found time to send his men off to raid Ismaili territory in the Jabal as-Summaq, destroying villages and killing their inhabitants. The Sunni historian, Ibn al-Jawzi, claimed that it was these attacks which sparked off the Assassins’ animosity.
Plans were immediately set in train by Sinan for a series of retaliatory attacks. The first fidais team struck in January 1175, while Saladin was besieging Aleppo. They got close – but not close enough.
Thirteen men, all armed with knives, were chosen to kill him. The size of the team was a direct reflection of the importance of the hit. Saladin was a priority target, and Sinan wanted him definitively eliminated on the first attempt, before his security measures could be ramped up. The team timed their attack to coincide with the communal meal, when servants and guests would be milling around and everyone would be most at ease – and most distracted. Everything was in place for an overwhelming assault.
It was thwarted by a single piece of bad luck. When the fidais arrived at Saladin’s camp, ‘an emir called Khumartakin, lord of the castle of Abu Qubays, saw and recognized them, because he was their neighbour who met and fought with them often. When he saw them, he said to them, “What has brought you here? On what business have you come?” ’
It was an easy question with no easy answer. Knives were drawn as they tried to push their way through. They stabbed the emir ‘with some deadly blows and one of their number charged towards Saladin to slay him but was killed before he could reach him. The rest of the Ismailis began to fight and killed several persons before they themselves were killed.’
The fidais team failed, but they took as many of the Ayyubid soldiers with them as possible. The Assassin who got closest to Saladin was ferociously cut down, and his head was hacked off by an emir who came to the sultan’s rescue. Saladin’s chancellor, Imad al-Din, wrote that ‘the others were not killed until they had killed a number of people’. The fidais did not die quietly.
Saladin’s propagandists had long sought to denigrate their enemies by association with heretics and crusaders. Trying to extract at least something good from what had clearly been a very close call, they claimed that the Assassins had been put up to it by the sultan’s rivals in Aleppo. This was not impossible, but it was also very convenient. The Assassins had plenty of strong motives to kill Saladin in their own right. They may have been coordinating their attacks with the sultan’s enemies for practical or tactical considerations, but it was not the main driver behind their animosity.
Saladin himself was shaken by the attack. He composed a letter, while he was still in the freezing siege camp of Aleppo, to his nephew, Farrukh-Shah – the weather was harsh, he wrote, ‘but men’s minds are hardened by the expectation of victory’. He made it clear that he believed the Aleppans to be behind the attempt, and that they were working in concert with the Assassins.
The sultan wrote that they had already received large sums of money for their attempted assassination. He advised his nephew to be on his guard at all times, and to surround himself only with men who he already knew. Above all, Saladin was now fully aware that the Nizaris were coming for him – in a vivid turn of phrase, he told Farrukh-Shah that ‘the knives have been distributed’.
Sinan sends his regards
After the failure of the attack at Aleppo, there was a period of bluster, threat and bad-tempered diplomacy. It was perhaps after this first attempt on his life that Saladin was said to have ‘sent a messenger to [Sinan] with a threatening message, and [Sinan] said to the messenger: “I will show you the men with whom I will encounter him”. Then he made a sign to a group of the companions to throw themselves off the highest point of the fortress, and they threw themselves one after another and perished.’ Regardless of the details of the encounter (and this was, after all, a Sunni account of the episode) the theatre of death was a stock in trade of Nizari diplomacy. They were happy to re-emphasise it at critical points.
Kamal al-Din’s biography of Sinan includes excerpts from a letter which Sinan is said to have written to Saladin, also in response to a message from the sultan. The correspondence probably dates to this same period of hate-filled ‘phoney-war’. Saladin had, it seems, demanded Sinan’s presence at his court. The demand had been accompanied by insults and threats against the Assassins’ castles and lands.
Mysterious as ever, Sinan set the tone of his response by riposting with some suitably menacing poetry:
O you who threaten me with strokes of the sword,
May my power never rise again if you overthrow it!
The dove rises up to threaten the hawk,
The hyenas of the desert are roused against the lions!
He tries to stop the mouth of the viper with his finger,
Let the pain his finger feels suffice him.
Having established the mandatory threatening nature of his reply, Sinan proceeded in a characteristically esoteric manner. It is worth quoting the letter in some detail, as it is one of the rare instances in which we get a first-hand insight into the mind of a Nizari leader. It shows how he saw the world and, just as importantly, given the Assassins’ dependence on the leverage of fear, how he wanted the world to see him.
‘We have read the gist and details of your letter,’ Sinan wrote, ‘and taken note of its threats against us with words and deeds, and by God it is astonishing to find a fly buzzing in an elephant’s ear and a gnat biting statues. Others before you have said these things and we destroyed them and none could help them…If indeed your orders have gone forth to cut off my head and tear my castles from the solid mountains, these are false hopes and vain fantasies.’
Sinan continued in similar vein, setting out self-justifications which verged upon self-pity, alongside supremely accomplished threats. ‘We are oppressed and not oppressors, deprived and not deprivers’, he wrote, slightly peevishly, ‘…prepare means for disaster and don a garment against catastrophe; for I will defeat you from within your own ranks and take vengeance against you at your own place, and you will be as one who encompasses his own destruction.’ The conclusion to Sinan’s reply was all the more menacing for its lack of hyperbole. ‘When you read this letter of ours,’ he wrote, ‘be on the lookout for us.’
The fidais were on their way again.
‘Hardly Crediting His Escape’
In May 1176 Saladin was besieging the castle of ‘Azaz, which belonged to one of his Sunni rivals. Here the Assassins launched another, and even more deadly, attempt on his life, with a smaller but more focused team.
Having failed to inflict fatal blows on the sultan in the first attempt, this time the fidais had strict orders to go for the most vulnerable, and critical, parts of Saladin’s body – his neck and head. ‘On 22 May 1176,’ wrote Ibn al-Athir, ‘while Saladin was in a tent belonging to one of his emirs, [a man] called Jawuli, the commander of the Asadi troop, [an Assassin] leapt on him, struck him on the head with a dagger and wounded him.’
This was close, but not close enough. The dagger, which was launched at his skull, met with iron rather than with flesh. Spooked by the previous attempt, Saladin was more protected than before. Under his flowing outer garments, he was almost totally covered in layers of concealed body-armour.
The armour saved Saladin’s life. ‘Had it not been for the mailed helmet under his cap,’ wrote Ibn al-Athir, ‘he would have been killed. Saladin grasped the [Assassin’s] hand in his, although he was unable totally to prevent him striking a blow. However, he could only give him weak blows. The [Assassin] continued striking him on the neck with his dagger. Saladin was wearing a brigandine and the blows fell on the collar of the brigandine, cutting into it. The chainmail prevented the blows reaching his neck, because his allotted end was still some way off.’
Saladin’s men immediately rushed to his aid. An emir, named Yazkush (an old retainer of Saladin’s uncle, Shirkuh), ‘came forward and seized the dagger in his hand. The [Assassin] wounded him but he did not let go until the [Assassin] was killed. Another Ismaili advanced and was killed, and then a third, who was also killed.’ Saladin was hustled away to his tent ‘in a state of shock, hardly crediting his escape.’
The second team member had killed one of Saladin’s commanders, a man named Da’ud, before being hacked down in turn. Another fidais fought on until he was killed by Saladin’s brother. The last surviving Nizari escaped from the tent, but was torn apart by the crowd that had quickly gathered outside.
The fidais had got close by being disguised as members of Saladin’s own elite guard. After the attack, security had to be tightened still further, with particular attention being paid to the soldiers surrounding the sultan. Ibn Wasil wrote that:
‘The sultan rode to his tent, terrified by this event, with his blood flowing down his cheek and the collar of his chainmail wet. He hid himself away, took precautions and constructed around his tent something resembling a palisade to cover it. He sat in a wooden house, on his guard against the soldiery. Those whom he did not like [the look of] he sent away and those he recognised he allowed in.’
Security measures such as this ruined many careers. Proximity to power was everything, and being deprived of that proximity could be a disaster. In a rather touching HR aside, Imad al-Din, who had been an eye-witness to the attack, wrote that when Saladin ‘rode out, if he saw anyone in his entourage whom he did not know, he had them removed. [But] afterwards he would ask about them and if they wanted intercession or help, he would help them.’
It was not just the sultan who was shaken. Shock-waves reverberated throughout Saladin’s fragile, personality-based empire. Ibn Abi Tayy, a Shi’ite chronicler, wrote that ‘the army was disturbed and people were afraid of one another’. Saladin quickly sent a reassuring message back to Egypt, in order to discourage any thought of an uprising. ‘There was only a scratch with some few drops of blood,’ he wrote implausibly. Perhaps more to the point, he was keen to emphasise that ‘there is nothing to cause distress.’
But everyone knew that it had been a close run thing.
Peace Without Trust
Saladin, not surprisingly, responded with violence, putting Sinan’s castle of Masyaf under siege. Eventually a grudging truce was cobbled together.
After this, the Assassins generally remained neutral. They had presumably given reassurances to Saladin about his personal safety. He too, however much he privately detested them as heretics who had killed his friends and tried to murder him, seems to have pulled back from the brink of further antagonism. He did not involve them or their lands in his attacks on the Franks. And, extraordinarily, he even included them in peace treaties that he drew up which might affect their interests.
An uneasy peace was sustained. Love binds – but so too does fear.
You can get your copy of Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood through
Yale University Press website
Amazon.com
Amazon.ca
Amazon.co.uk
To learn more about Steve, please visit his website or follow him on Instagram
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