History is a discipline widely cultivated among nations and races and eagerly sought after. The men in the street, the ordinary people, aspire to know it. Kings and leaders vie for it. Both the learned and the ignorant are able to understand it. For on the surface, history is no more than information about political events, dynasties, and occurrences of the remote past, elegantly presented and spiced with proverbs. It serves to entertain large, crowded gatherings and brings to us an understanding of human affairs. It shows how changing conditions affected human affairs, how certain dynasties came to occupy an ever wider space in the world, and how they settled the earth until they heard the call and their time was up. The inner meaning of history, on the other hand, involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events.
Ibn Khaldun (d.1406)*
THE DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED IN writing about the Assassins fall into two main areas. First, most of the history of the medieval Middle East is, to all intents and purposes, a military history. The ‘men of the sword’ were the body politic or at least its sine qua non throughout this entire period and if we look at the great events of the period from the Arab conquests of the seventh century, through the Crusades period and into the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, this seems startlingly clear. The Assassins are, at first glance, the very antithesis of such a military history. They generally avoided battle, substituting political killing in its stead, and there are almost no great campaigns or bloody battles to recount about them directly.
The second problem relates to the old truism that history is written by the winners. The Assassins disappeared from importance in the affairs of Persia and the Levant in the thirteenth century, crushed out of existence by the Mongols and by the Turkish Mamluks of Egypt. Both these enemies, and the many foes the Nizari Ismaili Assassins had faced before, were either Sunni Muslims or later converts to that division of Islam. Sunni writers, right from the birth of the Ismaili sect, stigmatised the movement as the greatest heretics ever to have arisen from within Islam. Indeed their vitriol extended so far as to call the followers of Ismailism, the parent movement of the Assassins, adherents of Dajjal, the Antichrist whose appearance will herald the advent of the Last Days. The eleventh-century writer Al-Baghdadi neatly encapsulated the feelings of mainstream Islam:
The damage caused by the Batiniyya to the Muslim sects is greater than the damage caused them by the Jews, Christians and Magians; nay, graver than the injury inflicted on them by the Materialists and other non-believing sects; nay, graver than the injury resulting to them from the Antichrist who will appear at the end of time.*
Finding the truth amid chronicles that condemn one side whilst panegyrising the other’s leaders is, of course, vital if we are to follow Ranke’s dictum for historians, ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ – to show simply how it really was. But the period covered when one chases the Ismailis and Assassins through history is a long one, and, as Jean Cocteau once said, ‘over time myth becomes history and history becomes myth.’ How the writings and ideals of 750, however erroneous, affected the culture of ideas and sentiments in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is also of vital importance to us if we are to grasp a fuller idea of how it really was. So myth is recorded here too, but all due warning is given to the reader whenever it is encountered.
Returning to the first problem, this is a military history simply because the Assassins, through both their successful and failed political killings, fractured and divided the Islamic world before the arrival of the army of the First Crusade in Islam’s western lands and were very much centre stage during the Mongol devastation of Persia and Iraq. In both of these episodes there are enough bloody battles and inspired stratagems, acts of extreme heroism and of depraved cruelty, skilled statecraft and deplorable blundering to satisfy any reader.
What is most difficult about writing this military history is that during the writing of any kind of history of the Middle Ages complex theology frequently rears its ugly head. This is particularly the case with medieval Islam as it lacked the apparent unity and ‘uniformity’ that Catholicism still retained at this juncture. It is not my intention to discuss in depth, as others have done, the highly complex and often confusing arguments and divisions within Islam, Shiism and Ismailism that led to the birth of the Assassins. However, as James M. McPherson demonstrated in his superb study of the American Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, leaving battles and campaigns divorced from the politics they grew from and shaped leaves the reader uninformed about why men fought and how states waged war. Furthermore the fact is that in the medieval world, just as today, politics is religion and religion is politics.
Not many people in the West have heard of the Nizari Ismaili Assassins although the word ‘assassin’ itself, derived from the Latin assasinus and born, most likely, of the Arabic hashisiyyi (plural hashishiyyun) or hashish, is ubiquitous in its usage to describe cold-blooded political murder. But these men and the dread they engendered are worthy of study if for no other reason than that we are still living with the consequences of the successful establishment of a Latin kingdom in Syria in the eleventh century and of the Mongol irruption into the Middle East in the thirteenth century. Since they were catalysts for both events, a ‘rediscovery’ of the Assassins is therefore vital for understanding both what happened then and what is occurring now in the world’s central lands.