Templars and the Assassins: The Real History
They were real, they were neighbours, and they dealt with each other for over a century. The Nizari Ismailis — called the Assassins by their enemies — held a string of mountain fortresses in Syria, a day’s ride from Templar territory. The two orders negotiated, fought, and for a long stretch the Templars simply taxed them.
It is a stranger relationship than the video games suggest, and considerably less cosmic. There was no eternal war between light and shadow. There was a protection payment of 2,000 gold pieces a year, and a murder that nearly caused a diplomatic crisis.
Who the Assassins actually were
The Nizaris were a branch of Ismaili Shia Islam, formed after a succession dispute over the Fatimid caliphate in 1094. Led initially by Hasan-i Sabbah from the fortress of Alamut in Persia, they were a religious and political minority surrounded by far stronger Sunni powers, and they developed a method suited to that position.
Unable to field armies, they targeted individuals — commanders, viziers, religious authorities — using operatives who struck in public, usually with a dagger, usually without expecting to escape. The point was deterrence: a ruler who knew he personally could be reached behaved differently toward Nizari communities.
Two corrections to the popular image are worth making. First, their most frequent targets were fellow Muslims, principally Sunni leaders — crusaders were a secondary concern. Second, the hashish story is almost certainly false: the name Hashishiyya was a term of abuse used by their enemies, and the drug-fuelled paradise-garden tale reaches Europe through Marco Polo, long after the fact and at second hand.
The tribute: when the Templars taxed the Assassins
This is the detail that surprises people most. The Syrian Nizaris, hemmed in by Zengid and later Ayyubid pressure, paid an annual tribute to the Knights Templar — reported as 2,000 gold besants a year.
The arrangement made sense for both sides. The Nizari fortresses sat near territory the Templars controlled, and the military orders were the most permanent armed presence in the region: kings came and went with each crusade, but the Templars and Hospitallers held the same castles for generations. Paying them bought a quiet frontier. For the Templars it was straightforward income from a neighbour who could not afford a war on a second front.
It also tells you something about how the Order operated. The Templars were not crusading zealots who refused all contact with Muslim powers; they were a standing institution in the Levant that negotiated, made treaties, and collected revenue. That pragmatism was exactly what critics in Europe disliked about the military orders — and exactly what the long war against Saladin had taught them.
THE ENEMY IS AT THE GATE
When the enemy is at the gate, pragmatism outlives ideology.
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1173: the murder that broke the deal
The best-documented episode between the two is an embarrassment for the Order.
Around 1173, the Syrian Nizari leader — Rashid al-Din Sinan, the figure Latin sources call the Old Man of the Mountain — sent an embassy to King Amalric I of Jerusalem. According to the chronicler William of Tyre, the proposal under discussion was extraordinary: the Nizaris would consider converting to Christianity, in exchange for the remission of the tribute they paid the Templars.
On the return journey the envoys were ambushed and killed by Templars, led by a brother named Walter du Mesnil.
The motive William of Tyre assigns is blunt — the Order stood to lose 2,000 besants a year. Amalric was furious, both at the loss of a diplomatic opening and at the breach of safe conduct given under his authority. He demanded the killer be handed over. Grand Master Odo de St Amand refused, on the grounds that a Templar brother answered only to the Order and the Pope, and offered to send the man to Rome for judgment instead. The king, by William’s account, eventually seized Walter du Mesnil by force.
How much weight to put on this is a live question: William of Tyre was consistently hostile to the Templars and their exemption from royal and episcopal authority, and his account is the main one we have. But even discounting the bias, the episode shows the shape of the relationship — financial, local, and governed by interest rather than ideology.
Both ended, and neither ended the other
Neither organisation destroyed the other. Both were destroyed by third parties, within a few decades of each other.
The Nizari power was broken by the Mongols, who took Alamut in 1256; the Syrian castles then fell to the Mamluk sultan Baybars in the 1270s, the same ruler whose campaigns were steadily dismantling the crusader states. The Templars lost their last mainland foothold at the fall of Acre in 1291, and the Order itself was dissolved in 1312 by a French king and a compliant pope.
The Nizari community, it is worth adding, was not exterminated. Nizari Ismailism survives today as a worldwide Muslim community led by the Aga Khan — a continuity the Templars cannot claim.
What the games changed
The Assassin’s Creed framing — two ancient societies locked in a philosophical war across millennia, free will against order — is invention, and the series has never pretended otherwise. The real contact was regional, commercial and roughly a century long.
What the fiction gets right is subtler: both were small, disciplined, intensely committed organisations that punched far above their numbers by being more coherent than the powers around them, and both were eventually crushed by larger states that found them inconvenient. That is a genuine parallel, and it needed no conspiracy to produce. For what the series takes from the historical record and what it invents, see the real history behind the Templars in Assassin’s Creed.
How the Assassins entered the European imagination
The reason the Nizaris loom so large in Western storytelling is largely an accident of who wrote about them.
Crusader chroniclers encountered a small, disciplined sect whose methods they could not match and did not understand, and they wrote it up accordingly — the mysterious Old Man of the Mountain, commanding absolute obedience from followers who would kill on a gesture. The image was already dramatic before Marco Polo added the secret garden of paradise and the drugged recruits, a story he reports at long second hand and which no Nizari source supports.
From there the word itself did the rest. Assassin entered European languages as a common noun for a political murderer, carrying the legend with it into every language that borrowed it — which is why a Syrian minority sect’s nickname is now an ordinary English word.
The practical effect is that almost everything popularly “known” about the Assassins comes from their enemies and from a Venetian traveller, not from them. That is worth holding in mind next to the Templars, whose own reputation was likewise written largely by hostile parties — the trial record — and has proved just as hard to correct.
The short answer
The Templars and the Nizari Assassins were Syrian neighbours, not cosmic enemies. The Nizaris paid the Order roughly 2,000 gold besants a year; in 1173 Templars killed a Nizari embassy returning from the King of Jerusalem, apparently to protect that income, and the Grand Master refused to surrender the killer. The Mongols and the Mamluks ended the Assassins; a French king ended the Templars.