as a quintessential villain during the crusades. The word Assassin, in variant forms, had already passed into European usage as a term for a hired professional murderer in this general sense. The Italian chronicler Giovanni Villani, who died in 1348, tells how the lord of Lucca sent 'his assassins' (i suoi assassini) to Pisa to kill a troublesome enemy there. Even earlier, Dante, in a passing reference in the 19th canto of the Inferno, completed in 1320, speaks of 'the treacherous assassin' (lo perfido assassin); his fourteenth-century commentator Francesco da Buti, explaining a term which for some readers at the time may still have been strange and obscure, remarks: 'Assassino è colui che uccide altrui per danari' (An assassin is one who kills others for money). The most widespread awareness of the Assassins in modern Europe, and their incorporation into the Romantic tradition, was created by the Austrian historian and Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in his 1818 book, Die Geschichte der Assassinen aus morgenländischen Quellen (translated into English in 1835 as The History of the Assassins). This work was the standard one on the history of the Assassins in the West until the 1930s. The Assassins appear in many role-playing games and video games, especially in massively multiplayer online games. The assassin character class is a common feature of many such games, usually specializing in single combat and stealth skills, often combined in order to defeat an opponent without exposing the assassin to counter-attack. The Exile series of action role-playing games revolves around a time-traveling Syrian Assassin who assassinates various religious historical figures and modern world leaders. The Assassin's Creed video game series portrays a heavily fictionalized Ḥashshāshīn order, which has expanded beyond its Levantine confines and is depicted as having existed throughout recorded history (along with their nemesis, the Knights Templar). Both orders are portrayed as fundamentally philosophical orders, rather than religious orders, in nature, and they are expressly said to predate the faiths that their real-life counterparts arose from, thus allowing their respective "histories" to be expanded, both before and after their factual time-frames. In addition, Assassin's Creed draws much of its content from historical facts, and incorporates the purported last words of Hassan i Sabbah as the actual creed ("Nothing is true; everything is permitted"); the sources of that quote are largely unreliable. Since its release, the series has developed into a franchise which consists of novels,