League of Shadows

The League of Shadows was an organization led by Ra's al Ghul in the film Batman Begins and led by Talia al Ghul in The Dark Knight Rises. They are based on the League of Assassins.

Origin
The League of Shadows was an ancient and powerful secret society that restored balance to places where, in their minds, the environment was affected by human corruption. Some of their activities were the sacking of Rome, starting the Black Plague, and the great London fire.

The men who have sworn allegiance to Ra's al Ghul and the League of Shadows come from many different backgrounds; former soldiers, mercenaries, assassins, petty criminals and ordinary men. However, all of them share a common similarity in which all desire to find justice and a hunger for vengeance to redress a crime inflicted upon him or his loved ones.

Every member of the League of Shadows are fanatically loyal to Ra's al Ghul and his cause. It is this fanatism in which every Shadow warrior knows that he is expendable, his life forfeit, if it means fulfillment of Ra's al Ghul's ultimate plans.

Thirty years before the events of The Dark Knight Rises, a foreign mercenary in an ancient part of the world was exiled by the warlord that he worked for because he married the warlord's daughter. The mercenary's pregnant wife was imprisoned as price for his exile. The mercenary became Ra's al Ghul, the leader of the League of Shadows, and years later the League stormed the ancient prison to exact revenge over the death of his wife in the prison. In the process they rescued an inmate, Bane, who aided in the protection and escape of Ra's young daughter, Talia, from the prison. Talia and Bane were then trained in the arts of the League, that of theatricality and deception, but Bane was excommunicated by Ra's al Ghul for reminding Ra's of the hell he left his wife to die in and for loving Talia. A rumor had said that Bane was expelled for being too extreme. Talia resented her father's decision. The League was then based on a mountain in the Himalayas (though other bases around the world may have existed).

Batman Begins
The League of Shadows created an economic depression meant to destroy Gotham City when Bruce Wayne was a young child. However, the crime that resulted from it brought about the death of Thomas Wayne and his wife. This shocked the people of Gotham, most notably the rich and powerful, into saving the city from the depression.

A number of years later, Bruce himself joined the League to fight injustice. While traveling the globe, he was recruited from a Tibetan prison by a man named Henri Ducard, who saw great potential in the angry young man. After completing his training, he saw what the League really was, and left, destroying their base and the man he believed to be Ra's al Ghul himself. However, he saved Ducard, his teacher while in the League.

Bruce returned to Gotham City and became Batman to fight the city's crime, using Ducard's lessons in the martial arts, stealth, intimidation, and theatricality. Meanwhile, the League was busy bringing a fear toxin (created from a hallucinogenic blue flower grown near their Himalayan base) into Gotham by employing some of Gotham's criminals, most notably Carmine Falcone and The Scarecrow. After Batman put both men behind bars, the League was forced to act sooner than expected. Using a microwave emitter stolen from Wayne Enterprises, they began vaporizing the city's water supply, which the toxin had infected. Everyone who breathed in the toxin turned on each other in blind panic.

Batman, with the help of James Gordon, was able to stop the League before it could vaporize all the water in the city. In the process, Batman left Ra's for dead on a train that crashed, causing him to perish in the crash and resulting explosion.

The Dark Knight Rises
Following the death of Ra's al Ghul for which she blamed Bruce Wayne, Talia ended her resentment of her father and attempted to bring justice over his death and finish her father's work with the aid of Bane, who had become known as a mercenary following his excommunication from the League. Talia hid in the shadows for years as Miranda Tate, and infiltrated the Wayne Enterprises Board of Directors to fund and gain access to their top secret fusion reactor and have it turned into a nuclear bomb that she controlled by a remote trigger.

Bane attracted the attention of the intelligence agencies with involvement in a successful coup d'etat in West Africa for John Daggett's diamond mining interests. Bane staged an elaborate scheme with the League of Shadows members to subdue CIA agents on a plane and fake the death of nuclear scientist Doctor Pavel in a plane crash to detract suspicion from their aim to use him. Bane challenged Batman to a fight in his underground base in Gotham, wherein he outlines his aims of fulfilling Ra's al Ghul's destiny by destroying Gotham.

While Bane was left in charge of the day to day command of the army and resources that they would need to begin their revolution, Talia used her false persona to undermine Batman's allies in various ways including misleading Gordon's group of cops into believing that a decoy truck was the one containing the bomb and by alerting Bane of a meeting with U.S. Special Forces within the city,

Bane was shot by Selina Kyle on the Batpod, never to be seen again, and Batman fired on Talia's bomb truck in his aerial vehicle and led it to crash where she drew her last breaths, confident her plan for the nuclear annihilation of Gotham was unstoppable. The other members of the League of Shadows in the city were killed or captured by the GCPD.

Batman saved the city by sending the bomb far away from Gotham over the water where it detonated.