Steve Tibble's "Assassins and Templars"

Steve Tibble is honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of The Crusader Armies, The Crusader Strategy, Templars, and Crusader Criminals.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood, and shared the following:

On page 99 we find the local leader of the Assassins, an extreme and highly secretive religious group, lulling a neighbouring Bedouin leader into a false sense of security and, it was said, after luring him ‘into his hands, he put him in fetters and killed him in cold blood’. The Bedouin were unimpressed and responded accordingly. They launched a surprise attack on the Assassins and in the frenzied slaughter that followed, the Assassin leader's head and hand were cut off, and his body was hacked to pieces ‘by swords and knives’.

Page 99 is eerily good as an example (albeit a partial one) of the book's main narrative...that the Assassins and the Templars both developed into what one might luridly call 'religious death cults'. They used the 'extreme ways' of their cults to carve out a level of influence that was vastly disproportionate to their numbers. On this page we find the Assassins being attacked by some extremely annoyed Bedouin - but despite the setback of having their leader's head and hand hacked off, the Assassins pursued the Bedouin tribe for almost twenty years to get their revenge. The Assassins turned grudge-holding and political murder into an art-form. Relentlessness and the implacable delivery of death were at the heart of their 'brand-promise', and that promise has reverberated through the centuries.

The Assassins and the Templars have become two of the most legendary groups of modern times - and that 'brand promise' is at the heart of their enduring interest. Although both have accumulated a huge deadweight of mythology and absurd conspiracy theories along the way, the roots of their intertwined story contain, oddly enough, much that is true and similar. The tactics were different, but their foundations were the same. The promise of unstoppable death might be ‘in your face’ in the form of a Templar charge. Or it could be unstoppable death ‘in your back’ in the form of an Assassin’s dagger. But death was at the core.

Both groups were tiny in number, certainly compared to the military and political behemoths that they were frequently pitched against. But they were huge in terms of the effect they had on the world. Both groups were legends in their own lifetime, and those legends have only grown over the intervening centuries. Their myths have inevitably become distorted over time – but they were often deliberately promoted and are not entirely without a basis in fact. This book is the story of the unlikely reality behind those equally bizarre legends.

Visit Steve Tibble's website.

The Page 99 Test: Templars.

The Page 99 Test: Crusader Criminals.

--Marshal Zeringue