Female Assassins

I would almost guarantee that there have been female spies and assassins in any human age. (Recall that Lucrezia Borgia was rumored to have poisoned at least one of her husbands at the request of her father.) Probably most didn't have sects - most were probably just hired by the wealthy to do their work. And most of their work probably involved poison (often considered "the woman's weapon") vs. ninja stars or other elaborate weapons.

I'll go along with Mutive's assertion. Sure - there were female killers in any age. Likely as not, they killed with poison or some other 'non confrontational' method. IE: Suffocation or drowning.

There weren't any 'sects' of secret assassins in the European world. Unless you want to give that honor to the church?

Google "middle ages" assassins - tons of resources out there about the history of assassins.

Yeah - don't think of assassins as the shrouded in black, skulking in shadows types. The best camouflage for an assassin is hiding in plain sight. See Robin Hobb's Assassin trilogy for a good portrayal of how an assassin might operate.

WriteKnight said:

There weren't any 'sects' of secret assassins in the European world.

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That's what you think, we are just so successful that...

... I mean you're right. No secret societies of assassins here. That's ridiculous. *whistles innocently*

Vaguely Piratical said:

That's what you think, we are just so successful that...

... I mean you're right. No secret societies of assassins here. That's ridiculous. *whistles innocently*

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Hah hah hah, I was thinking the same thing.

I could actually buy that there *were* secret sects...you'd just have to make sure that they were so secret that no record of them existed.

But as long as people have wanted other people dead, there've been assassins, I'd imagine. Women might even be better suited than men as they're often less suspect. (I believe a fair number of female spies were used during the US Civil war with that assumption.)

And, much easier to slide one more female servant into a household on the alert for threats. "Pah, she's just an old woman, what can she do?"

Elven_Fforestydd said:

So having a female assassin would be believable, maybe not so much on the whole secret guild. Unless it was made really believable. We could just start an conspiracy theory.

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Depends on how well written it is, and (not sure how to put this exactly) how much the rest of the story accurately reflects the time frame.

If you are just giving the story a medieval flavor, while ignoring most social conventions- like, for instance the fact that women weren't generally held in high regard or that young woman from a good/wealthy/noble family would rarely if ever be seen out of the house without a chaperon or that normal people almost never traveled far from where they were born - it doesn't bother me.

If the whole story accurately reflects the time except the fact that nine out of ten people don't find this travelling, lone, female who clearly has money (since she isn't starving to death missing most of her teeth, or covered in scars from disease and a hard life) and has scars from weapons training and sword fights it would bother me a lot.

Does that make sense?

You might find that people start to wonder who was actually killed in the village.

Rumours of medieval sects are exaggerated...

Witches, anyone?

Have you read any of the Sister Fidelma books by Peter Tremayne? She is not an assassin but an advocate of the Brehon Law Courts. She travels and solves murders - not quite what you are after (and they have a Celtic setting) but some of the social and religious nuances may be of use to you. Not sure about Paul Doherty's Mathilde of Westminster series - she is a sort of medico at the court of Edward I - again some of the nuances and restrictions of female life may be useful.

Elven_Fforestydd said:

Yes that does make sense. The idea was that the woman was from a welsh villige distroyed by the English in the early 1400s during the welsh revolt led by Owain Glyndwr. She survived and somehow ends up an assassin working for one person. She is sent to kill a lord but discovers that he was a friend from the same welsh village. The lord also survived and was adopted by a childless welsh sympathizer . I don't know if that idea even works historically.

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It's unlikely that there would be any organization dedicated to training her in the craft of assassination.

Instead, she would probably think of herself as a murderer or a cutthroat, rather than an assassin. Any fighting skills she would have learned from bandits or soldiers; any skills with poisons from a local midwife or wise woman.

In other words, a self-made assassin.

I would avoid the term "Assassin," which didn't come to have its modern meaning until the mid-16th-century. The "Sect of Assassins" that predates this meaning were Muslims fighting against the Christian Crusaders.

Elven_Fforestydd said:

What if she were picked up by someone and made an apprentice of sorts and he was a for hire killer?

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You could make up a secret order of killers. A previous point about the word assassin is correct, at the time it referred to a particular Muslim sect, but why does it matter that there wasn't a sect of killers for hire?

I don't find a sect of knives for hire much less likely than a young orphan girl somehow training herself in weapons and poison then finding people willing to pay her to kill people.

pilot27407 said:

no weapons for long range killing.

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Crossbow the original point and click technology!

...Just saying.

Also bows.