13: ‘Whose Holy Land?’ The ‘Christian-Muslim frontier’ in Assassin’s Creed

Quinn Bouabsa Marriott, @Quinn5566, University of Leeds

Existing on cultural and religious boundaries, studies of ‘frontier societies’ have served as useful insights for historians, particularly for those looking at the cross-cultural contact between Christians and Muslims, a ‘Christian-Muslim frontier’. One of the earliest games to portray such societies is Assassin’s Creed. Set during the Third Crusade (1187-92), Assassin’s Creed presents the player with the rich, historical environment of the Holy Land. Exploring the cities of Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem, the player becomes acquainted with the depictions of both Christian and Islamic spaces.

Starting with Damascus, the city is framed as a centre for Islam, filled with mosques and minarets as well as inhabited by an exclusively Muslim population. Additionally, the city is illuminated with bright and clear colours, combining to evoke a nostalgic connection to the era of the Islamic Golden Age. Because the city is not the focus of this crusade and not subjected to any conflict in the game, a wider theme from popular culture can be inferred: that a lack of any European intervention allows Islam to preserve its scientific and prosperous nature.

Evidence of the opposite is apparent in Acre where, following its conquest by crusaders in 1191, the city experiences an immediate ‘de-Islamification’. We are shown a clear lack of a Muslim presence, the population completely replaced by European Christians and the mosques and minarets left in ruin. Simultaneously, Acre is also ‘Europeanized’ with churches, mosques turned into churches, and the stereotypical use of gothic for the city’s cathedral of the Holy Cross. Furthermore, the area’s dark blue tones, combined with the scene of a war-torn city, brings forth the popular image of a ‘Dark Age’ Europe. This leaves us with a simplistic, segregationist model of the frontier. This is influenced by the game’s use of a ‘clash of civilization’ narrative, where the romanticized conflict between King Richard and Salah ad-Din has left Christianity and Islam in direct opposition.

Jerusalem, however, manages to break this simplistic picture of separated Christian and Muslim spaces, as it contains a mix of both. Although the population is entirely Muslim, and the city is under the control of the Ayyubids, we find the presence of both churches and mosques, and even a Jewish synagogue. On top of it's green-ish tones - a mix of the colours from Damascus and Acre - the overall presentation of Jerusalem can lead to the suggestion that the developers intentionally presented the player with an initially black and white model through Damascus and Acre, only to introduce further nuance upon reaching Jerusalem.

Such portrayals of cultural exchange are surprisingly consistent with the scholarship. It was only a few years before the game’s release that historians like Christopher MacEvitt were increasingly questioning the segregationist model in favour of a much more multicultural approach in the relationships between Christians and Muslims.31 In more recent times, although the ‘multicultural model’ appears to be a lot more promising, scholars have also been careful not to fully accept it either,

31 Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp.13-4.

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concluding that the truth of the matter must lay somewhere between the two models.32 Regardless, the game should be credited for attempting to engage with the contemporary historiography.

Looking back at some of the developer interviews as well, this presentation of nuance can be further hinted at, the producer Jade Raymond stating that “we needed to capture the experience of living during this tumultuous time: the fusion of European and Middle-East art and architecture, the hustle and bustle of medieval city life”.33 This point is reinforced in a YouTube video released by Ubisoft, titled ‘Assassin’s Creed: The Real History of the Third Crusade’, which affirmed their historical focus as on the cities themselves.34 This implementation of historical complexity serves as a great gateway into thinking about how the historiography can be implemented and engaged with in games.

This complexity, however, was a potential that was left unexploited, overshadowed by the prior mentioned use of the ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative. Enforcing the Third Crusade as a binary conflict, we find several preachers who lead the cities' people to either support the ongoing crusade or a jihad, Richard or Salah ad-Din. By comparison, the cities' designs are superficial, and their significance is left unnoticed by the average player. Conclusively, this attempt to breathe life into the historical environment would have merited from much greater levels of engagement, requiring features that not only connected it to the game’s wider narratives, but incentivised meaningful interaction from the player.

32 Alan V. Murray, ‘Franks and Indigenous Communities in Palestine and Syria (1099-1187): A Hierarchical Model of Social Interaction in the Principalities of Outremer’, in East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. by Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), pp.291-310 (pp.296-7). 33 Magy Seif El-Nasr, Maha Al-Saati, Simon Niedenthal and David Milam, ‘Assassin’s Creed: A Multi-Cultural Read’, Reflection and Review, 2 (2008), 1-32 (p.12). 34 Ubisoft North America, ‘Assassin’s Creed: The Real History of the Third Crusade’, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er6z-afGceQ&ab_channel=UbisoftNorthAmerica 36