Event Type: HA

Takes Place: 16th December 2025

Time: 7.30pm

Venue: Online

Description: The Assassins and the Templars are two of history’s most legendary groups. 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. In this engaging account, Steve Tibble traces the history of these two groups from their origins to their ultimate destruction. He shows 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.

How to book: Online via Zoom link below.

Price: Free & open to all. Recordings of talk will be available to HA members.

Email: shortcourses@history.org.uk

Website: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_nsR4AslJT2a9-2yw-3Naow

Organiser: HA

Lecturer: Steve Tibble