If you’re into video games, you’ve probably heard that the third installment of the wildly popular Assassin’s Creed series is set during the American Revolution. I’m not sure what a member of an eleventh-century Islamic order is doing in eighteenth-century Boston, but the folks behind the game apparently did their homework.
The first time I heard anything about this sect was in a college class on the medieval Middle East, when my professor assigned Bernard Lewis’s The Assassins. Now every kid with a video game console is familiar with them; it’s the Velociraptor-Chamberlain effect at work, I suppose. How many questions about the Assassins do you think the guides at Colonial Williamsburg will be getting because of this?
