MEMS Anselm Lecture 2025

Anselm Lecture 2025

Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood
Dr Steve Tibble (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Lecture hosted by the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS), University of Kent

The story of the medieval world’s most extraordinary organisations, the Assassins and the Templars

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.

Dr Steve Tibble is a research associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is one of the foremost academics currently working in the field of the crusades.

Join us for this free public lecture with post-lecture drinks, sponsored by CAMEMS.