Assassination

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"Find them, kill them. In doing so, you will sow the seeds of peace."

―Al Mualim conversing about assassination targets with Altaïr, 1191.

Ezio Auditore da Firenze assassinating Carlo Grimaldi

An assassination is the targeted killing of an individual by a sudden or secret attack, often for political reasons. Over the centuries, political organizations like the Templar Order and most prominently the Assassin Brotherhood have carried out innumerable assassinations of their enemies to advance their causes. In the context of the Assassins, the term assassination has also been applied to techniques for killing a target stealthily in a hostile situation, regardless if they were the primary target of an operation.

Background

The term assassination comes from the word assassin, which in turn comes from the Arabic word "حشّاشين" (ħashshāshīyīn), or "Hash-Smokers". Historian Shaun Hastings argued that the Hidden Ones adopted the later name of Assassins as a mark of pride. Both incarnations used contracts to outline targets, explain the reasoning for their targeting and even to specify manner of death at times.

Though precise in their methods, both sides of the Assassin-Templar War did not complete assassinations at times due to choice or circumstance. For example, the Louisianan Assassin Aveline de Grandpré spared the life of Antonio de Ulloa, and the Colonial Templar Shay Cormac would intercept Assassin contracts and prevent them from accomplishing their tasks. The Italian Assassin Ezio Auditore prevented the Templars from killing high profile people such as astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and then-prince Suleiman I.

Assassination techniques

Hidden Blade

Altaïr's codex on Hidden Blade assassinations

The first recorded use of the Hidden Blade was dated from the 5th century BCE, when Darius used it to assassinate King Xerxes I in Persia. Centuries later, his Hidden Blade was passed on to Aya by Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, and she in turn gave it to her husband, the Medjay Bayek of Siwa, to aid in their quest to eliminate the Order of the Ancients in Egypt. The Hidden Blade would go on to become the signature weapon of the Hidden Ones, the organization co-founded by Bayek and Aya, and of their later incarnation, the Asassin Brotherhood, with virtually all of their field agents possessing one Hidden Blade.

The Levantine Assassins Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad and Malik Al-Sayf worked to improve the methods of assassination using the Blade, three of which Altaïr documented in his codex: "from on high, from ledges, and from hiding places". These would later be dubbed "air assassinations", "ledge assassinations", and "hidden assassinations", respectively. Altaïr himself described these methods as basic, though critical. In the same codex page, he introduced another improvement: the addition of a second, identical Hidden Blade, to allow Assassins to dispatch two targets at once. This method was called a "double assassination". All of these techniques were taught to Assassin recruits, and became recognizable to the Templars.

Other variations

During the Isu Era, the Æsir Odin performed two unique assassination types in the dwarven realm of Svartálfaheimr: the "raven assassination" and the "teleport assassination", both of which were done with help of the Hugr-Rip, a gauntlet Odin wore that allowed him to steal the powers of giant ravens and the jötnar.

In the 5th century BCE, the misthios Kassandra used the Spear of Leonidas as a way to perform early assassinations, known as "stealth kills," in a similar fashion to the Hidden Blade. The spear, being an Isu artifact, granted Kassandra a multitude of abilities, including "rush assassinations", in which Kassandra used her spear as a projectile and was teleported to her target.

In the early 1510s, Ezio Auditore used a Hidden Blade variant known as the Hookblade in Constantinople and made use of ziplines to perform "zipline assassinations" on targets, where he would slide down the line using the blade's hook and launch himself at his target just before reaching the line's opposite end.

During the French Revolution, the Parisian Brotherhood made use of the Phantom Blade to assassinate targets from afar via deadly bolts. The weapon could also be upgraded to shoot berserk bolts that caused targets to attack their allies and potentially eliminate each other.

Poison

A slower method of assassination, but still widely used, was poisoning, which allowed elimination of targets without the use of force. The Babylonian Assassin Iltani used poison against Alexander the Great in her quest to retrieve his personal Staff of Eden, and the Egyptian Hidden One Amunet gave Cleopatra a vial of poison she used for her suicide.

Altaïr's codex on poisons

At some point before 1191, the use of poison was forbidden among the Levantine Brotherhood, and it was not until Altaïr became a Mentor that the prohibition was lifted. In his codex, Altaïr reserved a section for instruction on how to construct an alteration to the Hidden Blade that allowed the poisoning of targets, as well as instructions on how to distill the poison.

Poison also allowed for many different approaches in an assassination. The method used in Margaret of York's death, for example, was to separate the compounds of the poison into harmless ingredients which were administered through her food, makeup, and pillow. Queen Isabella I of Castile was slowly poisoned through her food until she succumbed to the poison's effects. The Black Cross Albert Bolden used a Templar pin with two types of poison: one that killed instantly and another that took one hour for its effect to take hold.

The Assassins and Templars made ample use of poison darts in their arsenal, regardless of the method of delivery: Aveline de Grandpré used both a blowpipe and a modified parasol, the Colonial Templar Shay Cormac used an air rifle, the French Assassin Arno Dorian used the Phantom Blade, and Jacob and Evie Frye used their Assassin Gauntlets.

High-profile assassinations

In the 14th century, the Italian Assassin Domenico Auditore built a sanctuary beneath his villa in Monteriggioni and included seven statues to honor the memory of the Assassins "who guarded the freedom of humanity when it was most threatened". The seven individuals chosen to receive statues were Qulan Gal, Darius, Wei Yu, Amunet, Iltani, and Leonius—all of whom were thought to have performed high profile assassinations—and Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad. Accompanying the statues were seals engraved with their famed weapons. Although neither Qulan Gal nor Amunet were directly responsible for the assassinations attributed to them, they still played important roles in their targets' deaths.

According to the descriptions that accompanied the statues:

• Qulan Gal assassinated Genghis Khan with a bow and arrow.
• Darius assassinated Xerxes I with a Hidden Blade.
• Wei Yu assassinated Qin Shi Huang with a spear.
• Amunet assassinated Cleopatra with an asp.
• Iltani assassinated Alexander the Great with poison.
• Leonius assassinated Caligula with a dagger.

Other notable assassinations were the assassination of Julius Caesar engineered by the Roman Hidden Ones, the assassination of An Lushan by Li E, the assassination of Cesare Borgia by Ezio Auditore, and the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy by Boris Pash and the members of his extremist Assassin cell Bloodstone Unit.