Assassins

The Assassins are invoked in the novel as a historical secret organization and as a recurring point of connection in the conspiratorial histories assembled by Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi. The text first associates them with the Templars through reports of contact, then folds them into a much larger Plan that links religious traditions, political movements, forged documents, and the imagined search for a hidden center of power. These references reveal more about how the Plan is constructed than they establish about the Assassins themselves.

Association with the Templars

During the account of Philip the Fair’s campaign against the Templars, rumors serve as a political instrument. Among the accusations circulated about the order was that its members had dealings with the Assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain and might have shared their secrets. The passage presents this association as part of a whispering campaign that helped turn existing suspicions into formal charges. It does not independently verify the alleged exchange; rather, it shows how the royal campaign used claims about the Templars’ supposed foreign connections to discredit them.

The mention makes the Assassins a suggestive counterpart to the Templars: a distant group imagined to possess knowledge that might pass between secretive orders. That possibility becomes valuable to the novel’s later conspiratorial reasoning, which treats contact between groups as a clue to a continuous hidden tradition.

The Plan’s expanding network

As Casaubon tries to guess the password Belbo may have used for his computer disks, he considers whether Belbo would choose a term associated with the Tradition. He then imagines that the conspirators might approach the disks through cabalistic methods rather than by testing combinations electronically. In this speculative chain, the Assassins belong to the larger field of secret knowledge that might supply a password or connect one historical group to another. The scene does not establish that the Assassins possess the disks or participate in any actual pursuit; it shows how the Plan has trained Casaubon to interpret even a practical problem through a hidden network of traditions.

The Assassins are also drawn into the characters’ invented history of the Jerusalemite group and its later branches. As Belbo and Diotallevi spin connections among religious and political movements, they treat the apparent separation of groups as evidence of rival lineages and concealed influence. The Assassins’ earlier association with the Templars helps make that kind of connection feel plausible within the Plan, even though the narrative’s method is to extend an analogy, not demonstrate a historical chain.

Rumor, forgery, and political use

The novel’s discussion of anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives offers a broader context for reading such associations. It traces how accusations attributed to secret groups were copied, altered, and repurposed, including the account of how the Protocols were constructed from earlier texts and circulated for political ends. Within that history, claims of hidden coordination are not neutral evidence: they can be manufactured and used to redirect suspicion toward a chosen enemy. The Assassins’ place in the Templar rumors belongs to this same atmosphere of accusation, where a supposed secret connection helps make a larger story of subversion seem coherent.

The Plan repeatedly transforms such uncertain links into apparent confirmation. A group’s alleged contact with another group becomes a bridge; the bridge is then taken as proof that both belong to a larger design. The references to the Assassins therefore function as an example of the Plan’s connective logic: suggestive historical material is made to bear more certainty than the evidence warrants.

Narrative significance

The Assassins have no independent dramatic arc in the supplied episodes. Their narrative importance lies in the work their name performs: it lends the Templars’ story an aura of transregional secrecy and gives the Plan another point of contact in its effort to make every tradition part of one system. At the same time, the novel’s account of conspiracy-making exposes the weakness of that method. Rumor, resemblance, and repetition can create a persuasive network without proving that the network exists. The Assassins thus remain both a historical reference and a measure of the characters’ growing tendency to confuse a compelling connection with established fact.