Game:

The Legend of the Prophet and the Assassin (2000)

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Let's Play

Duration: 14:49

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It's 1249 in the wild lands of the Levant... The Frankish territories in the East are living out their final years. Hounded out off the valleys of central Palestine, and now confined to the country's coastline, the last barons of the West are fighting a savage war to preserve what little they have left. Their enemy is no longer the "infidel" but greedy overlords and ever-demanding vassals...
The Holy City of Jerusalem has been won back from the Franks by a disparate coalition of Turcoman mercenaries in the pay of the Sultan of Egypt. The intermixing of peoples and interests over many years has blurred frontiers and broken down the barriers between religions: The Templars have seen savage conflict with the Teutonic knights and Bohémond IV, prince of Antioch, will soon join forces with the Mongol hoards to take Damascus and Aleppo. Out of this religious, political and military chaos, two men will emerge as legends: one through force of arms and the other through the words he speaks. The first is fated to swear the ruination of the other...

TANCRÈDE DE NÉRAC BY KYOT
I am Kyot, an old man whose eyes have seen many landscapes and whose mouth has uttered many tales. People sometimes ask me who was the most important person I ever met in my life. Do I then think of the many beautiful partners who shared my bed? Do I think of the men of power, the kings, barons and emirs before whose thrones I once recited in my poems? No. The man I remember as the most outstanding of all, the man whose outline is seared into my memory as if by red-hot irons was a shadowy warrior who was never ruled by any master. I'm now going to confide in you and tell you the little I know about this story...

Tancrède de Nérac was born into a cold dawn on the seventeenth day of the year 1203. The first son of a knight called Marsile de Nérac and the Lady Estelle de San Geli, he spent his childhood in the family castle in the southern Languedoc region of France, then held in the iron grip of greedy Northern barons. A quarrelsome and rebellious child, Tancrède was barely as tall as his father's sword when he was ready to throw himself headlong into the bloody battles being fought by the nobles of the West against the forced of Pope Innocent III. To prevent his son being killed at so young an age and to strengthen him in mind and body, his father sent him to the Bogomiles of Romania, knowing of their sympathies for the Cathars. But sometime along the journey, Tancrède outsmarted his minders and escaped to join a band of Hungarian knights en route for the Fifth Crusade. In their company, he landed at St. Jean d'Acre in February 1221 and it was alongside them that he was charging when an arrow hit him in the throat. Taken prisoner, Tancrède' freedom was bought by the Templars who nursed him back to health, after which favour he joined their cause. The Move was not a matter of conscience, but a repayment for the price of his life at a time when he seems to have had just enough scruples left to pay his debts. It was the impulse of a young man, for which he would soon have good reason to reproach himself.

It was there in Christ's army that he was to meet his closest companion in arms, Caradoc d'Orse, an exhuburent Breton and terrifying fighter, whose height alone was sometimes enough to frighten enemy paladins into retreat. Continual insubordination and defiance of their commanders meant that Tancrède and Caradoc remained the lowest of the low in the templar hierarchy. Tired of this war of petty skirmishes and ambushes between the Franks and the Easterners and greedy of pillage and massacre, the two deserted the Order with the intention of setting up their own fiefdom on the frontiers between the caliphates and baronies. Abandoning his heavy mail shirt and the straight sword used by the Western knights, Tancrède changed his identity to As-Sayf, "the scimitar", whose reputation as an exceptional leader of men and formidable strategist soon brought him fear and envy, hate and respect. Now a lawless desert pirate, the blond warrior rode a giant horse at the head of hordes of followers to slash a wide scar of fire and steel from the frontiers of Byzantium to the desert of the Néfoud: Tancrède de Nérac feared nothing... After many years of Nomadic existence as a mercenary and soldier of fortune, his conscience weighed heavy with the burden of all his atrocities. It was at this time that he heard tell of a man called Simon de Lancrois, a prophet, who had gathered others from every part of the world and from every religion and set them to work for a common cause: To build an ideal city, distant from all the torments of the world...

Fascinated by this dream, Tancrède parted company with Caradoc and set out to find Jébus, the town where Simon's disciples were said to be. After many years of wandering, As-Sayf finally thought he had arrived at the end of his quest, but he had yet to learn that his legend was only just beginning.

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