page_title: Assassination
section_title: Ancient to medieval times
hierarchical_section_title: Assassination / Use in history / Ancient to medieval times
caption_attribution_description: English: Henry III of France murdered by Jacques Clement. Français&#160;: Assassinat du roi Henri III par le moine Jacques Clément. Détail d'une estampe gravée par Frans Hogenberg, XVIe siècle.
context_page_description: Assassination is the act of deliberately killing a prominent person, such as a head of state or head of government. An assassination may be prompted by political and military motives. It is an act that may be done for financial gain, to avenge a grievance, from a desire to acquire fame or notoriety, or because of a military, security, insurgent or secret police group's command to carry out the assassination. Acts of assassination have been performed since ancient times.
context_section_description: Assassination is one of the oldest tools of power politics.  It dates back at least as far as recorded history.
  In the Old Testament, King Joash of Judah was assassinated by his own servants; Joab assassinated Absalom, King David's son; and King Sennacherib of Assyria was assassinated by his own sons.
  Chanakya (c. 350–283 BC) wrote about assassinations in detail in his political treatise Arthashastra. His student Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Maurya Empire, later made use of assassinations against some of his enemies, including two of Alexander the Great's generals, Nicanor and Philip. Other famous victims are Philip II of Macedon (336 BC), the father of Alexander the Great, and Roman dictator Julius Caesar (44 BC). Emperors of Rome often met their end in this way, as did many of the Muslim Shia Imams hundreds of years later. The practice was also well known in ancient China, as in Jing Ke's failed assassination of Qin king Ying Zheng in 227 BC. Whilst many assassinations were performed by individuals or small groups, there were also specialized units who used a collective group of people to perform more than one assassination. The earliest were the sicarii in 6 AD, who predated the Middle Eastern assassins and Japanese shinobis by centuries.
  In the Middle Ages, regicide was rare in Western Europe, but it was a recurring theme in the Eastern Roman Empire.  Strangling in the bathtub was the most commonly used method. With the Renaissance, tyrannicide—or assassination for personal or political reasons—became more common again in Western Europe. High medieval sources mention the assassination of King Demetrius Zvonimir (1089), dying at the hands of his own people, who objected to a proposition by the pope to go on a campaign to aid the Byzantines against the Seljuk Turks. This account is, however, contentious among historians, it being most commonly asserted that he died of natural causes. The myth of the "Curse of King Zvonimir" is based on the legend of his assassination. In 1192, Conrad of Montferrat, the de facto King of Jerusalem, was killed by an assassin.
  The reigns of King Przemysł II of Poland (1296), William the Silent of the Netherlands (1584), and the French kings Henry III (1589) and Henry IV (1610) were all ended by assassins.
caption: Assassination of King Henry III of France
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