The Assassin Order, also known as the Hashshashin, Assassin Brotherhood, or just Assassins, was an Ismaili Shia Muslim secret order that existed in the Middle East from 1090 to 1275. Founded by Hassan-i Sabah at Alamut Castle in Persia, the Assassins lived in the mountains of Persia and Syria and covertly murdered both Christian and Muslim leaders who were seen as enemies of the Nizari Ismaili state. Their nickname is derived from the Arabic phrase for "hashish users", a derogatory insult hurled at the mystical Assassins by their enemies. Their fidai ("self-sacrificers") used daggers, nerve poison, and arrows to assassinate enemy figures, and they killed three caliphs, a King of Jerusalem, and several Christian and Muslim leaders during the Crusades, the first of whom was Nizam al-Mulk in 1092. Marco Polo's writings introduced the Assassins to the wider world, but, later in the 13th century, the Mongols conquered the Assassin strongholds of Masyaf and Alamut and destroyed the order.
Conspiracy theory[]
A popular conspiracy theory holds that the Assassins were not just a Shi'ite religious order that existed in the medieval Middle East, but a philosophically-driven secret society in existence since Cain's murder of Abel at the dawn of human civilization. During the 5th century BC, the Persian assassin Darius invented the hidden blades as a means of fighting against the tyranny of the Achaemenid emperor Xerxes I, whom he assassinated in 475 BC. Lone-wolf assassins resisted the intrigues of the Order of the Ancients and the Cult of Kosmos in the ancient world, with the Cephalonian mercenary Kassandra wiping out the Cult of Kosmos in Ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian War and the Egyptian medjay Bayek founding the Hidden Ones in 47 BC with the objective of working in the shadows to protect free will and fight oppression. The Hidden Ones forbade the harming of innocents and were committed to secrecy, shaping the ideals of the future Assassin order.
In 1090, Hassan-i Sabbah was said to have transformed the Hidden Ones into the Assassin Order, with a visible presence in the Middle East. The Assassin Order stood by a creed of: "(1) Stay your blade from the flesh of an innocent; (2) Hide in plain sight, be one with the crowd; and (3) Never compromise the Brotherhood." The Assassin philosophy of wisdom coming from uncertainty rather than self-assurance, of philosophical skepticism and moral relativism, and promoting peace through open-mindedness and faith was a sharp contrast from that of the rival Templar Order, which sought to establish perfect order to restore peace to a chaotic world. The Assassins fought back against Templar plots and conspiracies to establish authoritarian regimes across the world, though their politics were often inconsistent: while they fought against the corrupt House of Borgia during the Renaissance and sided with the Patriots during the American Revolutionary War, they also opposed the radicalism of the French Revolution and were closer to the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Benjamin Disraeli than the Liberal opposition leader William Ewart Gladstone during the Victorian era. Inconsistencies in the Assassin's Creed could also be observed in its equal observance of commitment to the creed under pain of death and the romantic ideal of free ill, its desire for peace and its use of violence to achieve those means, its opposition to corruption despite its use of criminals such as Hope Jensen's New York gangs and London's Victorian Rooks gang to achieve its goals, and its tenet of staying one's blade from the flesh of the innocent, while not being above allowing for innocents to die (as in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake) in order for the order to maintain control over the mythological "Pieces of Eden." The Assassins engaged in a centuries-long conflict with the Templars in attempts to prevent the Templars from imposing their will over societies across the world, fighting on opposing sides of almost every major conflict in human history. The conspiracy theory even claims that the Assassin-Templar conflict continues in the modern day, with the Assassins working from the shadows to fight tyranny and the Templars utilizing puppets in positions of economic and political power to implement their tyranny.