I don’t play videogames like Assassin’s Creed, but I am extremely grateful to them for drumming up enthusiasm for history and even getting concepts about the Middle Ages into popular culture. So this post is not intended to diss Assassin’s Creed! (Which has a very engaging plot and awesome graphics IMHO). But, historians will be historians, so of course I have things to say . . . .
A lot of the visual settings from the 2007 video game are rooted in correct history. The game designers were making a fantastical story about a 21st century man who is captured and forced into a simulated reality of his distant ancestors from the Medieval past. The castle backdrops of the “Outremer” Crusader states look good, and the “Apple of Eden” relic has visual synergy with the “globus crucifer” or “cross-bearing orbs” in Christian art that symbolizes Christian authority.
And the nine individuals that the video game character Altaïr has to assassinate have historical roots. And, there was an actual group of a Nizari Isma’ili Shia Islamic sect known as the Order of the Assassins (who did not get high on hashish and imagine they were in some orgiastic heaven which made them want to obey their leader by killing, even though that is a great story and some Medieval people believed it).
The biggest historical inaccuracy (and there are many) is that the Knights Templar somehow favored a heavily controlled social order and that this drove the enmity between the Templars and the allegedly freedom-loving Assassins.
The phrase “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” is in the video game. And a French historian named Bouthoul did claim that the dying leader of the Assassins said it, (“rien n’est vrai, tout est permis”) but modern historians haven’t been able to track down that footnote in history and so we don’t believe it (yet).
Sources: You can hear more about this and other fascinating info on the Crusades in the latest episode of “’tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages,” by retired Naval Academy Medievalist Richard Abels, “A Crusader Murder Mystery: the Assassination if Conrad of Montferrat,” 26 May 2022. Jeff Taylor citing Bouthoul I Jeff Taylor, Vanderbilt University, “Notes on the origin of the phrase “nothing is true, everything is permitted”.
